Neighbourly navigation deal that bodes well for VR

In the global melting pot that is the digital travel market, a Czech and a Slovak company have decided that local is best, writes Sally White

Both leading edge in their fields, mobile navigation app builder Sygic of Brno, which claims 130-million-plus users,has taken a 51% stake in travel itinerary and booking group Bratislava-based Tripomatic. So, yet another navigation group is diversifying to offer a more comprehensive service. 

Still in the hands of their founders, the companies will retain their independence but work together. On the trip-planning mobile app for iOS and Android, the Tripomatic name is being replaced with ‘Sygic Travel’. The deal will help drive expansion plans at both companies. 

Sygic wants to upgrade its services. The plan is that Sygic Travel will launch first an app with immersive 360-videos that can be seen using a VR headset on Oculus Rift, and then one for Samsung’s VR devices. These 360 videos will not be added directly to the planner website or app at first, but the company expects to add the 360-video and VR content where ever it can. The aim is to connect virtual reality inspirational videos with the ability to plan and book a trip within the app. (More on VR developments here).

For Tripomatic, the deal brings cash to increase the number of programmers and is the partner it had been seeking for some time.

Media scrum

Sygic first caught media attention a couple of years ago when its charismatic CEO, Michal Stencl, 37 this year, told the BBC of his ambition at the age of eight to ‘destroy Microsoft’.  As a teenager he had already written his own operating system called Qube OS which led to a flood of job offers, including one from Silicon Valley.

However, he turned down the prospect of working for someone else, opting instead to stay in Slovakia and build his own company. Early ventures into gaming and Wifi systems were successful, but the real breakthrough came in 2004, when he saw opportunity in the fledgling GPS navigation field.  He has been growing the business steadily ever since.

 Sygic now provides travel and navigation products worldwide and has over 200,000 business customers, including companies like Amazon, Jaguar Landrover and Honda. It describes the sectors in which it works as ‘Public Transportation, Navigation, Apps, Android and iOS’. Sygic is ranked as No.2 publisher in the overall Travel & Local category on Google Play & Apple AppStore worldwide.

I realised that to build something difficult is definitely your competitive advantage against the others

Michal Stencl, CEO, Sygic

"I realised that to build something difficult is definitely your competitive advantage against the others," he told the British broadcaster. "The early mobile navigation environment was chaotic and cutthroat, a dog-eat-dog world of competing operating systems."

"When we started in 2004 there was Symbian, Linux, Windows Mobile - Maemo was the new flagship of Nokia - then iPhone and then Android. Nobody knew who was going to win the market. Our advantage was that we'd designed the whole app to be operating system independent.

"The design we'd done previously - to create a multi-platform engine - helped us to be the first navigation app that was available on the new generation of smartphones. We were the first on the iPhone, and the second on Android".

Not the first deal for Sygic

At Tripomatic, founded by husband and wife team Lukas and Barbora Nevosaova, the starting point was the frustration of trying to plan a Swiss holiday a few years ago. Finding that they had missed a number of places they'd like to have seen, they decided that there was a gap in the market for an app.

What they thought would take only a couple of months turned out to be a nine-month task. They started Tripomatic as a web-based service in 2011 and launched an iOS app a year later. That was followed with an Android app in 2013 and then expanded to Blackberry 10. They also revamped their website to create a unified experience across platforms.

Tripomatic is free to users - a brave move given that they have no external investors. Revenue is generated by selling offline data, and taking commissions from travel services. They also fund Tripomatic from their other projects.   

Tripomatic is not Sygic's first deal. In the mid-2014s it bought be-on-the-road, a smaller rival, which helped boost the number of downloads. In recent months, however, expansion has been via the launch of a wide range of new navigation apps and services. There was an app for motorcyclists last year, followed by a link with Parkopedia for parking and then, among other service areas - fleet management and municipal waste management, of all things!

Stencl can congratulate himself that not only did he foresee that smartphones would dominate the way we organise our lives, but has been making money from this trend. It is now months ago that he cashed in on the growth of connectivity for motorists - Sygic's head-up display projects routes from smartphones onto the windscreen at night. Yet his latest deal shows he is very aware of the need to keep ahead of the crowd as a stream of new navigation apps flow into the market.

Related Reads

comments powered by Disqus