Telenav recently acquired Skobbler, a crowd-sourced mapping company, in hopes of increasing its OpenStreetMap data. Telenav intends to use the OSM data to improve its navigation app Scout and extend its reach abroad.
Telenav paid $19.2 million in cash and another $4.6 million in common stock to seal the deal with Skobbler. The deal includes a transfer of Skobbler's employees, all of whom will now work for Telenav to increase its OSM database. Telenav has been using OSM data for a while now, but hopes that with Skobbler's help, the company will be able to incorporate the open-source data into its navigation app Scout.
Skobbler's extensive database of OSM information will certainly help Telenav market its app Scout on an international level for the first time. Essentially, Telenav's acquisition of Skobbler is a direct challenge to Google Maps and other navigation services.
"What we're doing is taking Scout international basically with this acquisition. We're rolling OSM into it and we're taking that to be an international product offering," Telenav's director of traffic and navigation services, Ryan Peterson said in an interview with TechCrunch.
Telenav aims to surpass Google using crowd-sourced mapping data to which Google Maps simply doesn't have access. The maps generated by OSM data are significantly more detailed and can even provide minute details like trees and walk ways for pedestrians.
"Looking at Google, compared to OSM and navigation, we've positioned ourselves very well now to leverage OSM - it's basically crowd-sourced and open which is very different than the Google model. And that is accelerating very rapidly," Peterson said.
"OSM is actually a lot more detailed than what Google offers and it's just a matter of time before OSM is, globally, far better than Google Maps from that perspective," he added.
Telenav has been using this super-detailed OSM data for a while now to make its app more competitive against Google Maps, but now that it has Skobbler onboard, Telenav aims to improve Scout even more. In the United States, Scout typically performs very well in iOS App store as well as in the Google Play store.
"Our interest in Skobbler is the people, a super talented team; it's the technology that they've developed on top of OSM; their OSM expertise; and their engine and their application," Peterson said. "It really matches everything we've been doing internally for making OSM navigable... so it basically doubles our capacity. Combining those two together gives us this worldwide coverage."
