Walk & Ride - Hamburg is live and available on the appstore in six languages.

As between Dec22 and Dec28 itunesconnect.apple.com was unavailable and reviewers out of their cubicles - this throughput time smells like lightning. I step back and erase everything said before: that. was. FAST.

Now we better be quick updating walknride.com ...
No small animals were sacrificed to make this work.

That's what I'd call a precision landing after a shaking flight: 01:33 now.

Thanks David, Marco, Ivan, Michael in Frankfurt and thanks to Frank in Yaoundé, Kamerun - Kudos to all contributing United Mappers, friendly testers and everyone who helped us out whenever help was needed.

Now let's "sacrifice a small animal" to appease the goddess in Cupertino and go to bed.

Forget the animal.
Go straight to bed.

United Maps' upcoming "Walk & Ride" app for the iPod touch and the iPhone was just selected as a finalist in the 2010 Navteq Global LBS Challenge. Judging takes place in Barcelona on Feb 13-15.

That'll be fun as we will demonstrate a mature release of Walk & Ride with everything urbanauts need to navigate the public transport jungle and walk away from traffic congestion and ugly CO₂ footprints.

... as Murphy's law bites:

C'me on, Cupertino.
That's not a good time for hickups.

UPDATE:

19:42: site was up again for half an hour, then breaking again ... "There was a general I/O error while processing your Application assets. Please contact iTunes Connect Support at itunesconnect@apple.com."

20:28: "Cannot Process Request. An error has occurred processing your request. Please try again later or send an e-mail to itunesconnect@apple.com for assistance." - all saints.

20:52: Hey, Apple - don't let me hang around with this:

21:09 ... here's a new one:

21:42 -- surrender.

As Apple seems to be quite rigorous rejecting apps that use standard icons but somehow reframe their meaning, we felt it would be safer for Walk & Ride to avoid those issues at all and do our own iconography.

So this draws heavily on the well-known AIGA memes and "Glyphish", beautiful work by Joseph Wain shared under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

These are the symbols we'll come up with:

Like it?

Heya!

Walk & Ride just has been nominated a finalist in the "utilities & other" category.

The 3 finalists will be chosen and announced at LeWeb conference on stage Dec 9th in the morning in front of 1800+ savvy internet users, bloggers and journalists.

With 945,6 km, the A7 is the longest German Autobahn and one of the heavily frequented transnational routes.

Starting at the danish border near Flensburg it leads on to Austria and further south.

The last missing part between Nesselwang and Füssen (near Neuschwanstein [nɔʏˈʃvaːnʃtaɪ̯n], the famous hut of the infamous Ludwig II) has been opened for traffic at Sept 1st 2009 (see the orange/white line on the montage. click for a larger view.).

Thats 3 month ago.

Do we see it on the map?
No.

When will we see it on the map?

Open for bets - put them into the comments please.

Assuming you got the buzz around Google Maps Navigation in the U.S. and consequently conventional PNAVs have been touted dead - or at least almost dead - here's just another perspective. GNav might swap over to Europe in 2Q10, earlier or later ... doesn't make a difference as a fully connected solution isn't a solution than rather a problem.

Though its features are impressive, breathtaking, (add your adjectives) ... it'll become a huge problem space - for both mobile carriers, end users and Google trying to offer a satisfying experience.

1. Mobile carriers want us to use mobile data but can't come up with demand: a 3G signal might be there but as too many users roam into the same UMTS cell, making everyone's share of the bandwidth smaller - resulting in insufficient bandwidth for data-hungry connected navigation solutions. Carriers can't seriously be interested in beefing up their networks as data prices drop faster than bandwidth grows. Ask any carrier rep for the realistic bandwidth available within moving vehicles ... here you go.
   
2. End Users within cars moving that are relying on their fancy iPhones and Androids become crabby as fully connected apps might well give them directions - but bandwidth is too limited to stream map tiles.
3. Google hence inevitably will offer an end-user product that is beyond their own standards of delivering a seamless user experience. Though it's free, fat and impressive - it likely won't solve the use case it was designed for: taking you safely from here to there.
4. Cost. Although the EU introduced a wholesale cap of €1 per megabyte downloaded - this quickly is eaten up by the amount of streaming map data consumed by connected devices within cars crossing European borders. Even if rendered to the smallest possible extend, the weight of many lightweight map tiles add up quickly. Consumers travelling outside their home networks will use a connected Android only once. And they will regret doing so after recovering from the exorbitant data roaming bill a month later. And this likely won't change too soon as mobile carriers love that little backdoor into our pockets. So the cost of a free product is high - for both the end user and Google.
   

There is some inherent logic why Nokia/Ovi, TomTom, Navigon and the usual suspects do only render frugal vector maps on their devices. The collateral won't change too soon: abundant bandwidth, cheap like water.

A very early build of our upcoming "Walk & Ride" app for the iPod Touch and iPhone was submitted to the 2010 Navteq Global LBS Challenge last week. We generously called this lab-release Paris Hilton build due to the Navteq Paris offices acting as an incoming office for all EMEA submissions - hoping this would push our page impressions over here ;_)

Kudos to all programmers, cartographs, engineers, testers and the loved ones at home missing us during the hectic last hours!

Will be interesting to see how this years contest works out. In 2009, Hamburg, Germany based skobbler won the EMEA Grand Prize - applauded and laudated being the smartest solution "using dynamic positioning technology and NAVTEQ maps". Besides skobblers well earned and enormous success in the Appstore, they seem to face some adversities.

Keep fingers crossed for United Maps' "Walk & Ride" - for the 2010 LBSC we submit a solution that doesn't easily fit into any of the standard categories as it tackles navigation and mapping from a fresh perspective.