Last week, representatives of many of the world’s leading cities – including London, Boston, Mexico City, Barcelona and Christchurch – came to San Francisco to learn from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs about how to make their cities smarter. One of the people behind this LLGA Cities Summit was the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Hirshberg, formerly the chairman of Technorati and now one of the world’s leading pioneers of smart cities.

Citing innovative urban data startups like MotionLoft and QuickPay, Hirshberg believes there are now huge opportunities for entrepreneurs with products that can make a city smarter. We are just at the beginning of this thing, he told me, before explaining that the biggest entrepreneurial opportunities lie in the development of crime, healthcare and traffic data – particularly in terms of making this data “predictive”.

But smart cities are about more than just making money, Hirshberg believes. In the Sixties being a citizen meant we protested, he told me, while today the good citizen builds APIs that make a city more habitable. And that’s why, he insists, we have to make what he calls “smart architectural decisions” to enable the right level of anonymity in the 21st century city. Otherwise, he warns, the smart city of the future will be too smart about all of us, thereby destroying the privacy of its citizens.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

There’s plenty of buzz about the concept of making our cities “smarter” — that is, loading them up with sensors and data-driven services to improve efficiency and quality of life. Hell, even Google has taken to loading up its event venues with scores of sensors.

Most of the discussion out there deals with how local governments are working toward this lofty, nebulous goal, but a team called Acrobotics Industries is trying to put the onus on the citizens. To that end the team has kicked off a $50,000 Kickstarter campaign for a small sensor array called the Smart Citizen kit in hopes that people will start collecting and sharing their environmental data with the world.

“There’s a problem with the way current cities were built,” Acrobotic’s COO Francisco Zabala told me. “Beijing’s air quality is insanely bad — we think we have it bad in L.A. — and it’s not getting any better.

The heart (or brain, I guess) of the Smart Citizen project is an Arduino-powered kit that gets tucked away inside (or outside, if you’ve got the right kind of enclosure) of a user’s home to track local environmental variables — think temperature, humidity, air composition, ambient brightness, and sound levels. It’s arguably neat enough to keep tabs on the environmental conditions at your home while you’re not there, but the real value here is when a host of users set up their Smart Citizen sensors and fire up them up en masse.

It’s the team’s hope that Smart Citizen kits will sell widely enough that regular people will be able to get an accurate glance at environmental conditions with a finer sort of granularity than you’d get by firing up, say, the Weather Channel app. For what it’s worth, Zabala concedes that the Smart Citizen project is largely geared toward making people aware of climate change and global warming without getting too political or divisive about it.

“I believe that climate is changing for the worse, but our approach is more personal,” Zabala said. “By raising awareness we’re working toward a solution without banging on people’s heads.”

As it happens, a few of those Smart Citizen kits have already been fired up. A quick look at a demo version of the sensor-tracking website reveals that a handful of the little things are live in Zabala’s native Barcelona — the Smart Citizen team ran an earlier, more local crowdfunding campaign (Zabala called it a “proof of concept run”) that saw a number of users in Spain install and fire up their sensor arrays all around the city. Hovering over a bright blue spot displays the latest environmental data (users can define how often they want those updates to occur), while greyed out units haven’t been fired up lately.

Thanks to how the Smart Citizen kit is constructed, users will eventually be able to monitor more than just the environmental criteria this early kit supports. Zabala said that the Acrobotics team is currently working on swappable daughterboards that will allow the Smart Citizen kit to be used for soil and water testing, too — perfect for you city-dwelling gardeners. If you’re suddenly itching to monitor your surroundings more acutely, you’ll be able to lay claim to a fully constructed Smart Citizen for $155 — the more handy among you can save a little money by springing for the $105 unassembled kit instead.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Nothing makes traveling to a new land more amazing than befriending a local or two. Meet the right person — someone outgoing, with knowledge of the locale — and it’s like punching in a cheat code. You’ll do better things, see better places, all while avoiding the generic tourist junk. But finding that person can be hard.

EatWith, a company presenting at Disrupt NY today, wants to make it easier. It’s like Airbnb for breaking bread with locals in their own homes.

Take the Airbnb concept of offering up your home as a sort of pseudo-hotel, but swap “hotel” with “restaurant”. Users pay the host for each guest (average prices seem to be about $35-$50 per guest per meal), and EatWith collects 15% off the top.

According to co-founder Guy Michlin, the desire to build EatWith came to him after a trip to Greece. His family was, by chance, invited into the home of a local family for dinner. A simple act, sure — but it was one that Guy still refers to as a “magical experience” for everyone involved. Guy and his family got to enjoy truly authentic Greek food (which he says “bore no resemblance” to that which they’d been served in restaurants) and culture, and it was the first time his host family had ever had anyone from Israel around their table.

“Most tourists won’t get a chance to meet the locals except maybe the Taxi driver, or the waiter in the restaurant,” says Guy. “but Eatwith aims to change this.”

Guests get an experience far removed from the standard series of tourists traps, and the chance to make new, local friends in the process. Hosts, meanwhile, get to turn their kitchen into a micro-business and meet new people along the way. And if a host maybe undercooks the meal a bit and folks get sick? There’s a third party $1M insurance plan in place to keep hosts from feeling the heat.

Until today, EatWith had limited its focus to Tel Aviv, Israel and Barcelona, Spain. All in all, they have about 130 hosts between the two countries, with “thousands” of hopeful hosts waiting for approval around the world.

At this morning’s Disrupt NY conference, the company announced plans to launch in at least two new locations: right here in New York City, and in a second location that will be voted on by the EatWith community in the coming weeks.

EatWith has thus far raised $1.2M, all from Israeli investors. Around 80% of the round was funded by Israel’s Genesis Partners, with the rest funded by local angels.

Of course, just because someone is willing to cook for strangers doesn’t mean they… you know, should be. I mean, I’d cook for just about anyone as long as they don’t mind that the meal is burnt toast with runny scrambled eggs. With this in mind, EatWith has given some hosts “EatWith Verified” badges. For now, this means that an EatWith employee has personally gauged that host’s food quality and cleanliness. Because that doesn’t scale all that well, they’re working on a system to allow frequent users to help verify hosts moving forward.

Disrupt Judges Q&A:

What keeps these dinners from becoming tourist traps themselves?

We’d like each host to limit the number of meals they host to 1 or 2 times a week. This keeps it intimate.

How do you vet for quality as you scale?

We’ll eventually allow certain users, the proven photographers and food bloggers, to help us vet new hosts.

What has surprised you most so far?

We were surprised by how many users — especially in Tel Aviv — were eating with hosts in their own town, rather than while traveling. We see less of this in Barcelona, as it’s a pretty tourist-centric area.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Last month Oliver and Marc Samwer — founders of the Rocket Internet startup incubator — launched Global Founders Capital, a new €150 million ($194 million) fund aimed at any and all startups worldwide. This month one of the first startups to benefit from that will be credit scoring startup Kreditech which has raised an undisclosed amount said to be “low to mid 7 digits”. We’ve heard USD$3.5 / EUR€3 million. This is in addition to the $4M is raised at the end of last year. Kreditech is live in the Czech Republic, Spain and Poland but, according to co-founder Felix Haas, will also soon launch in Russia, Mexico, Australia, Argentinia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan with its Kredito24 brand, which is not at all dissimilar to the UK’s Wonga.

Existing investors including Munich-based Global Founders Capital, Silicon Valley-based Blumberg Capital, Berlin-based Point Nine Capital and Hamburg-based H2 Investments also participated.

Sebastian Diemer, CEO and co-founder of Kreditech and Oliver Schimek, CFO of Kreditech said in a statement they had turned down lots of offers as they are currently “profitable” but the investors bring “strategic value” and add working capital.

The company has a technology which means they don’t require any external credit bureau data in their risk model, because they do identification, fraud detection and scoring decisions based on globally available data sources such as social networks. That means they can move fast into emerging markets, says Alexander Graubner-Müller, CTO and co-founder of Kreditech. Also involved is Heiko Hubertz, Nils Henning and Amiando founder Haas.

The technology is applied in B2C for issuing online, SMS and facebook microloans in real-time and plans a global “Scoring as a Service” database that provides scoring data without technical integration or contracts to third parties.

Kreditech operates offices in Hamburg, Warsaw, Barcelona, Moscow, Prague and Kharkov and employes 25 people.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Taxi e-hail startup Hailo is looking to expand the number of cities that it serves, and could soon add San Francisco and Washington, D.C. to that list. Based on a couple of job postings on the company’s website, the company is looking to hire city general managers for those two cities, signaling its plans to launch its app in even more new markets.

The listings were posted as the company looks to take advantage of new funding and introduce its service in new cities. A few months ago, Hailo raised $30 million from Union Square Ventures, KDDI, Richard Branson, and other investors. With that cash, the company is looking to expand across a number of new cities. As CEO Jay Bregman wrote to me when I asked about the San Francisco job posting, Hailo want’s to be wherever there are licensed cab drivers:

“Hailo wants to be in New York. Hailo wants to be in San Francisco. Hailo wants to be in Breckinridge, CO. Hailo uses existing infrastructure and works anywhere there are licensed cabs.

Setting up a local infrastructure and recruiting driver-partners and local drivers are key pieces of our operating philosophy. We understand that more medallions are slated to be on the streets of SF and drivers are worried about making ends meet. Help is on the way.”

Hailo’s app is currently available in London, Dublin, Toronto, Boston and Chicago. The company is also working to bring its e-hail app to New York, Tokyo, Madrid, and Barcelona soon.

In New York City, Hailo — and all the other taxi apps, for that matter — are still in a holding pattern while waiting for litigation to clear up between the Taxi & Limousine Commission and a bunch of livery car drivers. (That’s something we’ll be talking about at Disrupt NY 2013 in a few weeks, by the way.) The Tokyo launch comes in part thanks to that investment from Japanese telco KDDI.

The San Francisco market is already pretty well acquainted with on-demand ride services. Local residents have been using their mobile phones to hail rides from services like Uber for a while. There’s also Lyft and SideCar for those who don’t mind riding in some regular dude’s car. Flywheel, another taxi hail app, has been in the Bay Area for a while, also. (You might have known it as Cabulous.) Oh, and then there’s InstantCab, which offers some kind of a hybrid cab and community driver ride-share thing. So there’s plenty of Hailo competitors already there.

In Washington, D.C., the competition isn’t quite as fierce, but Hailo won’t be alone in the e-hail market. Uber has been operating in the capital for a while, and has even launched its UberTAXI service there, thanks to a deal it struck with the local city council. SideCar is also in D.C. now, thanks to a big national rollout that it’s been embarking on after raising $10 million of its own.

But hey, competition is good, right? It makes everyone better, gives consumers choice, gives me something to write about.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This week Japanese tech giant Fujitsu acquired an obscure French company called RunMyProcess for an undisclosed amount. This “integration Platform as a Service” (iPaaS) company offered a platform to allow businesses to build and deploy business workflow apps in the cloud using simple drag and drop functionality. It sounds mundane enough, but the acquisition looks like being yet another pointer to a future where business applications are integrated in the Cloud, in much the same way systems integrators using creaky old servers would do the same with software. But one small startup, GetApp, is quietly building both a vast archive of these cloud-based business applications and the means to make them work together in a simple enough way that means that millions of small businesses can access business apps previously only available to large enterprises.

Earlier this century when Barcelona-based entrepreneur Manuel Jaffrin (pictured, on the left) ran the now non-existent ‘Web 2.0′ section of Sun Microsystems he got a glimpse into the future. “While interacting with startups I saw how cloud apps would eventually replace the software used by businesses,” he tells me. Meanwhile, Christophe Primault (pictured), at the time the founder of a software security startup, was having trouble getting distribution for his application. The two met and realised there was an opportunity to create a startup to act as a marketplace for business applications.

According to Forrester, business-focused SaaS apps are the leading and fastest growing segment of the cloud computing industry in the main because small businesses see it as a way of accessing enterprise-class applications that are normally out of reach. Take for example Base which brings a really good looking and powerful sales and CRM application to small businesses.

Jaffrin and Primault realised that closed app ecosystems would not serve the needs of the huge proliferation of SaaS startups. The Salesforce App Exchange, for instance, would always be limited to the Sales Force ecosystem.

What was needed was a ‘vendor neutral’ marketplace.

So together they launched GetApp in 2010, positioning the startup as a vertical search engine for software, SaaS and cloud-based business applications on one side and a means for application providers to reach qualified buyers and lower the cost of acquiring new customers on the other. Business buyers would be able to shave off weeks from the purchase cycle of new applications.

GetApp would garner revenues from revenue shares on the use of the apps or from charging app providers to promote and advertise their apps on the site.

The site now lists 5,000+ apps from 20,000 vendors making it arguably the largest business app marketplace today.

Vendors now include the likes of Basecamp, Salesforce, Dropbox or Zoho, among many others. Available app categories range from CRM to marketing automation solutions, HR and project management tools to accounting and business intelligence applications.

To date over two million businesses have now used GetApp to discover the SaaS product they need from a catalogue of 5,000 cloud-based business apps, with the vast majority of its users in English speaking countries like the US. Every month 150,000 new businesses turn up to use the platform and 100 new SaaS vendors sign up.

GetApp has managed to turn the chaos of the business cloud apps in into order. Instead of spending hours trying to good for the right sales tool or CRM product, customers simply put in a detailed query into GetApp and can search 200 categories, read reviews for 300+ products and 2,000+ user generated reviews.

For instance you can get it to search for an email marketing tool connected to Salesforce which also has an iPad app. This is the kind of search that Google just can’t handle.

Customers can also browse “how to guides”, infographics and eBooks about the apps.

But, Jaffrin and Primault were not satisfied with simply being a marketplace. They realized small businesses would want to connect these apps together to automate tasks and break data silos. The alternative would, for example, mean laborious cutting and pasting between a contact database and a CRM product. Small businesses needed, as the SMB Group recently predicted, real integration.

So October 2011, GetApp secured $1.1 million from Spanish-American investment firm Nauta Capital to achieve this.

Thus, in October last year they launched CloudWork, after acquiring Portuguese startup Tarpipe. This meant GetApp could integrate the apps in their marketplace and offer their own service.

CloudWork’s competitors include Zapier, OneSaas, itduzzit and the aforementioned RunMyProcess. Zapier is targeted largely at technically competent users who need to do a lot of customisation, but this is unsuited to small businesses. OneSaas is more oriented towards accounting processes. Itduzzit.com/ meanwhile concentrates on “pre-packaging” apps. But all are quite different.

Since launching, CloudWork has added 30 apps to the platform including, Google Apps, Mailchimp, Zendesk and Evernote, and released over 250 packaged integrations which don’t reacquire a small business to have in-house technical skills to integrate these apps.

Although CloudWork is still in Beta and is not yet being actively marketed by the company it has already attracted over 4,000 business users that have executed over one million integration tasks. Companies can also ‘daisychain’ apps using CloudWork, opening up a world of possibilities.

And what of the future?

Jaffrin says that despite raising their last round of funding in 2011, GetApp doesn’t need to raise funding again as it’s profitable. The majority of the investment has gone instead into CloudWork, which has created a new opportunity in its own right.

Prior to using something like CloudWork, app vendors had no way of knowing where their best sales might come from due to the difficulty of tracking the use of their APIs. Instead, CloudWork has become a way to hack into another vendor’s ecosystem.

So, for instance, an app vendor could now tell that 50% of their users are also integrating their app with another app from Saleforce force. This means partnerships and alliances can be forged where non previously might have existed. It means the app vendor could do specific campaigns within another vendor’s ecosystem. In some circles this is known as ‘growth hacking’.

Is it possible that a small, 13-staff startup in Barcelona in an office over-looking a children’s playground could be on the cusp of a new wave for business applications? If the move by Fuijitsu recently is anything to go by, the answer might be yes.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Foursquare, the social, location-based check-in app that has been pivoting into becoming a more of platform for local search, has finally closed its Series D round of funding. Foursquare tells TechCrunch that it is $41 million, led by Silver Lake Partners in the form of a multi-year loan from the Silver Lake Waterman growth debt fund; and convertible debt from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and Spark Capital. It takes the total raised in the company to an eye-watering $112.4 million.

The news was first reported by BusinessWeek, and puts to rest speculation that has been swirling for over a year about how the company needed to raise money to avoid running out of cash; and questions over whether it would be able to do so because of lingering skepticism about its business model.

Despite its size and reach — Foursquare’s user base at the end of 2012 was 30 million; and it powers location information in some 40,000 apps — the company reportedly pulled in only about $2 million of revenue last year. Meanwhile, its last raise in 2011 valued the company at $600 million.

Earlier this year, we reported that a D-Round that would have involved equity was potentially being done at a $700 million valuation, but that investors were hesitating because of worries of a too-high valuation. When I was researching a story on the company in March, I was assured by one reliable source that this latest round — the one announced today — would not be a down-round, with a valuation lower than $600 million it had in 2011. By opting for what BusinessWeek reports as a loan-and-debt deal with no immediate equity (the debt has the option of converting to equity in the future), that puts off the question of valuation for a while yet.

And it also somewhat puts off the question of whether Foursquare is an acquisition target.

In the meantime, CEO and founder Dennis Crowley and his team have been working hard to continue building up the business, both to create actual revenue streams, and also to counterbalance the fact that many have checked out of making check-ins. In February, Dennis Crowley told me Foursquare was seeing 5 million check-ins per day, but that’s also what the company said a year ago.

In addition to major app updates that put search front and center, and deals like the one with credit card companies American Express, MasterCard and Visa for member discounts for check-ins, Foursquare has been working hard to build bridges with handset makers, carriers and other content providers that could potentially result in commercial licensing deals.

Crowley’s trip to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, spanning just a few days, saw him take in at least 30 meetings in that timeframe. Working with the old-school world of telecoms, though, is a long-term and long-odds game; this was not Crowley’s first year at the event.

Indeed, Crowley tells BusinessWeek that this round is about buying time for the company to play those long-odds out. “This allows us to get closer to being able to prove that there’s a real business here,” he said.

One area that looks like it will be getting more attention is advertising and marketing — specifically opening its platform to merchants to pay Foursquare to market themselves there. This is still a nascent part of the service — BusinessWeek points out that Foursquare “allows” only 50 large advertisers currently to buy ads. Some of the $41 million will be getting invested in a way to widen that pool, starting with bumping its sales staff up from 10 now to 40 by this summer.

“The biggest challenge is to take revenue-generating products that we launched in Q3 last year and take them out to the market,” Crowley told me in February. “The businesses using these are mostly national retailers [the 50 mentioned by BusinessWeek]. But we’ve got over 1 million merchants who have claimed their businesses on Foursquare, running specials and doing other things. What we want to do is take these tools used by the 50-100 national retailers and make them accessible to our 1 million merchants. Then you’ve got something really powerful.” These tools currently do not integrate with other point-of-sale systems, so that’s another area where the company might need to make some investments, too.

One thing we might expect is more of a Google-style approach to search marketing.

“If you look at what we’re doing in terms of harvesting intent from users, we have millions searching for things, and we’re helping them find places,” Crowley told me. “It doesn’t look that different from what google has done with AdWords. If you search for ‘Hawaiian vacation,’ Google shows you websites to get you there. And ‘Italian tasting menu’ will bring you a list of venues on Foursquare.”

BusinessWeek notes that by the end of the year, checking in at a particular location will get ads served relevant to that place — such as a brand of orange juice when you are at the supermarket. This could turn even more people off from checking in, though, unless there is a reward at the end of it.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Japan’s Midokura, a startup with offices in San Francisco, Tokyo, Lausanne and Barcelona, today announced a $17.3 million Series A funding round, led by Innovation Network Corporation of Japan, along with NTT Group’s DOCOMO Innovations, Inc., and Innovative Ventures Fund Investment, the investment arm of NEC Group. The funding will be used to hire and grow the team in preparation for future deployment and expansion of Midokura’s MidoNet network virtualization services.

Midokura sells its offering to companies that want to deploy their own cloud solutions, like mobile network operators and enterprise customers. It’s a virtualization offering that works with popular cloud platforms, simplifying the costs and requirements associated with managing cloud computing deployments. MidoNet is an infrastructure-as-a-service play, and has already managed to attract considerable interest from its beta product launch back in October of 2012.

“MidoNet, our software-defined networking product, is a solution for companies that are wanting to build a cloud, whether they’re a cloud service provider, or a hosting provider, or a large enterprise, or even a small company that wants to build a cloud, as you start the process you realize that it has some problems to do with scalability, with automation, with isolation,” Midokura Chief Strategy Officer Ben Cherian explained in an interview. “Our product MidoNet solves these problems having to do with cloud networking.”

This is a considerably large funding round, but Cherian said it’s what the company needs to grow at the pace needed to keep up with the interest so far. Co-founder Tatsuya Kato, who as part of this announcement is moving from the CEO position to a role as chairman of the board, originally set out to build essentially an Amazon Web Services for Japan with co-founder, former CTO and new CEO Dan Mihai Dumitriu, but found it to be a huge problem that needed addressing first, hence the creation of Midokura. Now, the team plans to grow the company quickly to accomplish its goals.

“A large percentage of this is to be put back into the company to build more product, to hire more engineers,” Cherian said. “The goal is really to go deeper in terms of the technology. We’re going to be doing more work in terms of adding features to it, in terms the management aspects to it, and in terms of integrations with other technologies and other companies out there. All of that takes people, so mostly the funds are going to be used to bring on more engineers and more technical folks.”

Midokura sees the market evolving quickly in this space, with more enterprise customers coming on board as demand increases and product awareness around software-defined networking grows. To make sure it can best meet the demand in that area when it arises, it’s laying the engineering groundwork now with this sizeable Series A.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Dropbox earlier today caused a Friday boom with its acquisition of hot new mobile mail startup Mailbox. The move has two layers of significance for the company, and it points to what more we will likely see in its future:

It’s a sign of an even bigger push into mobile for Dropbox. In addition to Mailbox, an app designed for iOS devices, Dropbox has made a few other acquisitions that point specifically to cloud services that work on mobile devices. They include Audiogalaxy for music and Snapjoy for pictures on the consumer side. And it also bought TapEngage, a startup that specialised in tablet-optimized advertising.

Dropbox clearly sees mobile as an essential route ahead for the company. Last month, Dropbox’s CEO Drew Houston was a keynote speaker at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where he gave out an open invitation to any and all handset makers and mobile carriers to get in touch to see where Dropbox could fit into their worlds. “If we’re not already working together, we’d love to work with you,” he said with a twinkle in his eye and a smile on his face.

He also said in Barcelona that mobile was the single-biggest platform for sign-ups for Dropbox in 2012, with the company now topping 100 million subscribers uploading 1 billion files per day on 500 million connected devices. That was due in no small part to the company’s relationship with Samsung, which integrates Dropbox into its smartphones and gives those buying the Galaxy S III 50 GB of free storage (an offer that may well get extended to the new S 4 devices).

It’s a sign of how Dropbox wants to be more than just a cloud storage company. This is the other motif behind all of Dropbox’s acquisitions. Storage is the thing that people pay for now, but down the line there are two reasons why Dropbox would want to have more. It may be that eventually Dropbox will want to make money from other revenue streams to diversify its business. Alongside that, it may want to have more services to keep consumers on Dropbox’s platform rather than going elsewhere — just like Google, Apple, Microsoft and others do.

In both of these cases, the acquisition of Mailbox, along with Snapjoy and Audiogalaxy, make sense. Add to this Dropbox’ first acquisition, of Cove, nearly a year ago to the day. That was a “stealth collaboration startup”, as Alexia wrote at the time, probably made more for talent than for actual product. But in any case, Aditya Agarwal and Ruchi Sanghvi, the two engineers behind Cove, will have brought strong product experience, gained from previous years at Facebook, also into the mix.

The move beyond cloud storage is an important route for Dropbox, and it should come as no surprise that it’s one also being eyed up by its similar-sounding, sort-of compatriot, sort-of rival, Box. CEO Aaron Levie says the company also sees mobile platforms as fundamental to its future growth, and it is in the process of testing out “Google Docs”-style services that could see it also expanding beyond storage and enabling other company’s cloud-based services, and offering more of its own.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As Nokia tries to separate out its mapping business and make it a standalone entity earning more than 1 billion euros per year, it has stripped its name entirely out of the unit. This past week, the company said it would take its name out of all navigation products and instead brand them with the word “HERE” — as in HERE Maps, HERE Drive and HERE Transit.

Yes, it does sound a bit strange. The real reason likely has to do with the fact that partners like Amazon and Mozilla, which license Nokia data for their hardware, might be touchy about having “Nokia” branding inside their products.

But in bureacro-speak, Nokia’s reasons are a bit different.

“HERE is a name that I think signifies what I call an ethos in cartography. HERE is about a sense of location,” said Michael Halbherr, the Nokia executive who oversees the company’s location and commerce unit, in an interview at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week.

“If you look at the brand, it’s the same font and the same color logic,” he said. “There are other companies that do it successfully with Microsoft having the X-Box, Bing and Skype brands.”

With the acquisition of NAVTEQ for $8.1 billion in 2007, the company brought in a licensing business that helped the unit bring in 278 million euros ($364.7 million) in the fourth quarter of last year.

That business handles four out of every five cars with an in-dash navigation system, Halbherr said. It also recently bought Earthmine last year for the company’s 3D-map making software, and partnered with Mozilla to bring location and maps to the Firefox OS.

Nokia views the model for maps as one that’s mostly about licensing with partners like Amazon and Ford, although they’re exploring commerce partnerships with companies like Groupon and recently launched a direct-to-consumer maps for iOS.

They face a competitive field including Google Maps, Microsoft’s Bing Maps and MapQuest among others.

Halbherr thinks they got a boost from the Apple Maps debacle, although he wouldn’t specify if it actually contributed to new deals.

“What happened when Apple launched maps was that the focus moved to quality and that’s clearly, clearly what is good for us,” he said. “To be a full mapping company, you have to drive the streets, you need data centers. It can look very simple and automated but the last 20 percent takes 80 percent of the work.”

He added, “You will end up in the content business if you want to build a great maps product.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch