We received two questions this week for the “Ask HP (our CEO) Anything” column. See below for HP’s answers. Please keep them coming! As a reminder, you can ask your question below or just send me an email at marybethl (at) telenav.com.

Josh: HP, keeping in mind that the average person spends most of their time indoors, if GPS worked as reliably indoors as it does outdoors, how would Telenav take advantage of this, today?  In 2 years?

HP: Josh, thanks for your question. There are a few ways that our services may leverage indoor location capabilities. For example, TeleNav Track allows for dispatchers to see mobile employees while they are out on the road - this means they can better route them to customers. This is all done through GPS since it is outdoors. But imagine if you were a very large enterprise organization that had multiple buildings on one large campus? If you managed the facilities for this campus, you might want to also know where your technicians were while they serviced the various buildings. Once they are indoors, it is harder to do this with GPS. Teams could also better find each other from level to level within buildings.

On a more consumer-level, indoor location technology could certainly be integrated with social networking services like our Whereboutz Facebook application. Say my daughter is shopping at the mall with her friends - now she could send them all a text message with her location (”at The Gap”) and not have to actually manually type in the location.

The possibilities are endless and we are certainly keeping on top of indoor location-aware technology so that we can leverage it as much as possible to provide even more value to our customers.

John R. Price: we keep hearing that telenav will be available for iPhone.  i’m planning on changing all our company phones to iPhone (we’re all MAC users, including all my lab folks) since i have everybody on AT&T already but i’m holding off until i know about some the apps AND telenav.  For me, telenav is critical. So, what’s the scoop?

HP: John, first I’d like to say thanks for being such a loyal customer and I’m thrilled that you are pleased with the service and find it useful for your business needs. If you have any feedback on features that you especially find useful or if you have ideas on how we can improve the service, please let us know. We are always open to the feedback.

Regarding the iPhone - everyone (myself included!) is excited to get GPS navigation on the iPhone but I am sure you can understand that, in general, we cannot announce anything until it’s available. Please keep an eye on our blog (we have an RSS feed if that’s easiest) for news of all our phone launches - we will notify customers here as soon as we can about when our service launches on new phones. If you use Twitter or Facebook, you can also get up-to-the minute TeleNav news alerts that way as well. There are links on this blog to follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Thanks again for the questions and have a great weekend.

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Author - Mary Beth Lowell - Communications Manager

Last Friday, we introduced our new "Ask HP Anything" column which gives our readers a chance to ask our CEO any question they might have.

Apparently, we are communicating things so well that only a few of you have questions…but if I’m wrong (what?!) and you are still interested in asking, just post a comment or question here or send me an email at marybethl (at) telenav.com. We’ll run this post each Friday with HP’s answers.

Thanks!

Here are HP’s answers to last week’s questions:

Q: (from Offbeatmammal) as far as I can work out the TeleNav service relies on downloading maps over the air, so can be pretty slow to update/refresh …. are there any plans to off-load any of the functionality to the device (for instance cache maps relevant to the planned route / current location etc) to cater for slow connection speeds or areas with no coverage?

HP: Offbeatmammal - thanks for the feedback. We are always looking at ways to improve the overall experience. This may include caching to the device as you suggested. We’ll keep you posted via this blog as we enhance the technology. At the same time, many new mobile phones are running on higher speed networks so this should help increase download speeds (e.g. 3G) if you are using one of these phones.

Q: (also from Offbeatmammal) just wondering if you have any plans for an in-dash unit with a bigger screen? Say based on Windows Embedded and including In Car Entertainment as well as the navigation capabilities?

HP: I wish I could provide specifics on some of the exciting things we’re working on right now but, unfortunately, I have to wait until they’re officially announced. In can tell you, though, that we are always exploring different opportunities for how to improve and expand our service so that we provide the best experience for our customers. To that point, we love to get feedback from our customers on what they want to see. Are you interested in an in-dash unit with a bigger screen? What else would you like us to consider for research and development? Your thoughts are always appreciated.

Q: (from George Zhao) HP, currently, how does the china cell phone users use telenav navigation services? If they do not like monthly subscription, can they choose to be charged by usage like the way people uses their phone card in China? Thanks.

HP: Hi George - TeleNav GPS Navigator is available in China through the wireless carrier China Mobile and customers pay through a monthly subscription. For the TeleNav branded product called TianTianXing, you can buy using a prepaid card for a limited period of time. By the way, just as a side note, China Mobile just announced at the end of Sept. that they currently have more than 436 million wireless subscribers! I believe they are the largest wireless carrier in the world.

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Author - Mary Beth Lowell - Communications Manager

This question about LBS from a CNET reader reminded us how confusing GPS services can be.

We’re working on a new section of our Web site that will help provide more information on how GPS works, how to decide between different types of products and anything else related to GPS that you tell us you want to know.

In the interim, however, we thought we’d open it up to discussion through this forum so we’re officially launching the "Ask HP Anything" column.

What does Hewlett-Packard have to do with any of this you ask?

Nothing actually.

HP is our CEO, silly (cool name, huh?). And he’s happy to answer any of your questions. Maybe it’s about how GPS works, how TeleNav works, the difference between TeleNav and other services, what’s up with GPS tracking, the difference between A-GPS and autonomous GPS, how to navigate around China or Europe, who’s going to win the World Series, who’s going to be the next president, what’s the meaning of life, etc. (ok, no guarantees on the last few).

If you want to ask him a question, simply post a comment here on this blog or send me an email at marybethl (at) telenav.com. We’ll post the interesting ones here so that everyone can read them.

Also - if you have any feedback about content on our blog (what can we do better? what do you want to read about?) please post it here or send me an email.

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