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.

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.

"Walk & Ride" is an upcoming iPhone app that takes hyperlocal maps and onboard routing to the iPhone and iPod Touch. iPod Touch? Sure - this is the other 50% of the installed base and they should have access to sweet maps also.

The short video demos "Walk & Ride" core functionality and makes the case for 'better maps give better apps'. "Walk & Ride" provides always-on pedestrian and public transit navigation, doesn't need (but may use) GPS and comes up with the best map available.

Here we go - the Appstar Awards expected a 30sec video to be published to YouTube - and this is what they got:

I would have liked to change the Video Startscreen to something else - honestly - but You Tube didn't let me do so. So: No, this ain't a video about Mr Eric Schmidt, this is about better maps - ours.

If you're one of the 120 million german speaking humans around: see the pre-launch website at http://walknride.com with additional information. If you ain't: wait for the launch and submit your E-Mail to be noticed. Walk & Ride will be mutlilingual, of course.

BTW, Appsfire: next time you set a deadline to a weekend - think first before you extend it to Monday.

Just in time to submit our proposal to the annual "Galileo European Masters Satellite Navigation Competition 2009". As even the sharpest signals need maps to be marked on, I hope the jury sees it the same way.

Here's the condensed posters we submitted: