All good things come to an end and our partnership with NAVTEQ for organizing their developer days in India too ended on a high note! For those of you who missed learning about the events, here is a round up of the happenings.

NAVTEQ, the leading global provider of maps, traffic, location data enabling navigation, and location-based services; held their first developer days in India. The intention of these day long programs was to share valuable information about the about the global opportunity for location-based applications and how developers can quickly apply their skills toward creating the most compelling location-based apps. There was a business as well as a developer angle to the events with Opportunities, Trends, Algorithms, APIs being discussed in plenty.

The events were held in Bengaluru (Bangalore) on April 26th and Delhi on April 29th. Developers were provided high speed internet access if they wished to do some live coding (and many of them did). Both the events were streamed live as well. The agenda was similar in both the cities.

Rajat Tandon, Director, India Sales, NAVTEQ – spoke on Trends and Opportunities in the LBS space. He shared statistics on the evolution and growth of LBS and APAC as a market besides giving an overview of NAVTEQ’s offerings. The top trends as pointed out by Tarun are:-
App Stores, TBT apps, Location Based Social Networks, Location Point Advertising (LPA), Probes, Connected Cars, Embedded Low cost Navigation devices.

Marc Naddell, VP, Partner and Developer Programs, NAVTEQ – shared useful information on how the NAVTEQ Network for Developers (NN4D) can assist developers every step of the way, from the initial stage of building LBS apps straight through to helping them with business development and marketing. Marc was full of facts and anecdotes. He spoke about a pilot with a leading pizza brand in India where they achieved a clickthru rate of as high as 4% using LPA.

Tarun Harnathka, Director, India Product Management, NAVTEQ – gave an overview of their products and shared what happens behind the scenes to create the magic that was seen in a video demonstrating the capabilities of their products. He spoke about innovation in Indoor Mapping, Advertising, Pedestrian tracks and more.

Michael Moore in Bengaluru and Abhijit Deshpande in Delhi, Technical Consultants, NAVTEQ – introduced the participants to the functional aspects of building location based software. They spoke on the finer aspects of Routing, Geocoding and Imaging.

Entrepreneurs – Shaheer Ahmed of Location Guru and Venkateswaran Kasirajan of Spime – Shared about their journey into the LBS space acquainting users with the subtle nuances of building LBS applications in India.

But the man who really stole the show in both cities was – Steven Citron-Pousty, Technical Evangelist, deCarta! Steve took hands on coding sessions in Delhi and not so hands on session in Bengaluru. He gave an introduction to deCarta’s Android, HTML5, iPhone and Samsung Bada APIs. “Steve is a full-time showman…tech clubbed with antics and a good control over what he says – true rockstar” tweeted one of the participants in Delhi.

To complete this information-packed day, there was a panel discussion on ‘Trends and Future App Opportunities in LBS-3G and Beyond’. A panel of industry experts shared their perspectives on the topic and a wealth of insights were shared on consumer vs enterprise applications, adoption, government policies, privacy, monetization and much more.

The panel in Bengaluru comprised of Indus Khaitan – VP Bitzer Mobile (Moderator); Shekhar Kirani – Venture Partner, Accel Partners; Marc Naddell – NAVTEQ; Shaheer Ahmed – CEO, Location Guru; Karthik Srinivasan, DGM Partner Relations, Vodaphone; and Parag Dhol, Director, Inventus Capital Partners.

The Delhi panel was moderated by Prashant Singh, Product Manager, Spice Labs & Co-founder MoMo Delhi; Maniesh Kulshrestha, Country Manager BD and Sales SiRF Technology; Mukul Singhal, VP at SAIF Partners; Yogesh Bijlani, Country Head and GM APAC at Telinity along with Marc and Shaheer.

Overall the events were very well received by the audience. Over 110 participants attended the Bengaluru event and more than 70 in Delhi. Close to a hundred unique viewers watched over 45 hours of video on the live stream. Hundreds of tweets proliferated the social network and the feedback from attendees was very encouraging.

Last but not the least there were three awesome give-aways for the participants – An iPad2 sponsored by NAVTEQ, a Samsung Galaxy Tablet sponsored by deCarta and a Sony Playstation Portable sponsored by HeadStart! Three lucky winners from both cities had a big reason to go back home smiling.

NAVTEQ and HeadStart thank our local ecosystem and media partners OCC Bangalore, MoMo Delhi, Only Gizmos and Your Story for their support in making these events a smashing success.

To summarise, location is going to be ubiquitous and right now is the best time to get into the location bandwagon.

For any information regarding the events you may contact NAVTEQDevDay[at]navteq.com. If you want to be kept posted for similar upcoming events please follow @NN4D.

You can also get access to the presentations here.

Some Pics from Bangalore and Delhi.