Have you ever been lost in your own city and needed to stop to ask for directions?

Well you probably have and we all know that getting around Indian roads is different than other places. It’s hard to spot road names or read signs so we Indians generally use landmarks as a source for identifying where we are and where we are going. “Take a right at the T-point and keep going straight till you see a big blue building and then make another right,” is what we would typically hear instead of “take a right on Crescent Street and then make another right on 3rd Avenue”. If we had GPS devices in India which spoke like the latter then we would probably be totally confused and lost. But thanks to Navteq we will now be offered GPS Navigation the Desi way.

Navteq is the world’s largest provider of maps, traffic and location data enabling navigation, location based services and mobile advertising. Navteq recently launched their services in India, but they have been here in the country for years conducting infinite amounts of gruesome research on how to help navigate the modern Indian. Last month I was invited to Mumbai to check out their massive and very impressive production facility. Their team showed me how they create maps and mark locations with multiple data inputs, from their employees walking the streets noting all kinds of information, to cameras mounted on high tech vehicles recording everything on city streets. It was really fun to see how the whole process works.

What Navteq is doing is brilliant in fact. They have launched an India-specific navigation software called NAVTEQ Natural Guidance. The product breaks new ground by enabling navigation applications to provide guidance that sounds like it is coming from a friend instead of a computer. The applications moves beyond the norm of using only time and distance based directional cues – such as “turn left in 50 meters” – by guiding the way Indians instruct each other through vivid descriptions of static orientation points like landmarks, points of interest and contextual elements, like big blue buildings and traffic lights. The driver will likely experience a more natural and more efficient navigation application and avoid stopping and asking for directions. It is simply brilliant.

Navteq is so hell bent on penetrating the fast growing Indian market that they have also announced the opening of a second production facility in Mumbai. Leveraging the success of the existing production centre in India, Navteq plans to increase global production capacity to enable the company to rapidly expand coverage and create new and innovative products for local, regional and global markets.