Wayfinder was a wholly owned subsidiary of

Vodafone Vodafone Group Public Limited Company () is a British Multinational company, multinational telecommunications company. Its registered office and global headquarters are in Newbury, Berkshire, England. It predominantly operates Service (economic ...

specializing in creating mobile navigation systems for a number of platforms such as

Symbian Symbian is a discontinued mobile operating system (OS) and computing platform designed for smartphones. It was originally developed as a proprietary software OS for personal digital assistants in 1998 by the Symbian Ltd. consortium. Symbian OS ...

2nd and 3rd edition, UIQ,

Windows Mobile Windows Mobile is a discontinued mobile operating system developed by Microsoft for smartphones and personal digital assistants (PDA). Designed to be the portable equivalent of the Windows desktop OS in the emerging Mobile device, mobile/port ...

and some other

smartphones A smartphone is a mobile phone with advanced computing capabilities. It typically has a touchscreen interface, allowing users to access a wide range of applications and services, such as web browsing, email, and social media, as well as mult ...

. An external

Bluetooth Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology standard that is used for exchanging data between fixed and mobile devices over short distances and building personal area networks (PANs). In the most widely used mode, transmission power is li ...

GPS The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a satellite-based hyperbolic navigation system owned by the United States Space Force and operated by Mission Delta 31. It is one of the global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) that provide geol ...

receiver is required for non GPS enabled phones. On March 12, 2010, it was announced that Vodafone was closing the company and all employees would be let go. On July 13, 2010, Wayfinder announced that they would open source their software under the

BSD 3-clause license BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD licens ...

. Source code for both the server (with import tools for map data from

OpenStreetMap OpenStreetMap (abbreviated OSM) is a free, Open Database License, open geographic database, map database updated and maintained by a community of volunteers via open collaboration. Contributors collect data from surveying, surveys, trace from Ae ...

) and client software for various phone operating systems (including

Android Android most commonly refers to: *Android (robot), a humanoid robot or synthetic organism designed to imitate a human * Android (operating system), a mobile operating system primarily developed by Google * Android TV, a operating system developed ...

iPhone The iPhone is a line of smartphones developed and marketed by Apple that run iOS, the company's own mobile operating system. The first-generation iPhone was announced by then–Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007, at ...

and

Symbian S60 The S60 Platform, originally named Series 60 User Interface, is a discontinued platform (computing), software platform and graphical user interface for Mobile app, smartphones that runs on top of the Symbian operating system. It was created by Nok ...

) is available at

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

Wayfinder Navigator

Wayfinder Navigator is a mobile GPS application that provides turn-by-turn directions through a mobile phone. By downloading pre-loaded maps, Navigator can provide directions and different points of interest without Internet connection. In May 2008, Wayfinder Navigator was updated to include pre-loaded maps,

social networking A social network is a social structure consisting of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), networks of Dyad (sociology), dyadic ties, and other Social relation, social interactions between actors. The social network per ...

and map coverage of 150 countries world-wide.

Wayfinder Earth

Wayfinder Earth is a mobile application that displays a 3D globe. The application contains over three million

Points of Interest A point of interest (POI) is a specific point location that someone may find useful or interesting. An example is a point on the Earth representing the location of the Eiffel Tower, or a point on Mars representing the location of its highest ...

(POIs) including restaurants, train stations, bars, museums, gas stations and hospitals. Another international application, map coverage includes

Europe Europe is a continent located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and Asia to the east ...

and

North America North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere, Northern and Western Hemisphere, Western hemispheres. North America is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South Ameri ...

. Wayfinder Earth can set favorites, save address searches and show GPS information such as speed, position and heading as well. As the maps are downloaded from the internet on the fly so the phone requires a

GPRS General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), also called 2.5G, is a mobile data standard on the 2G cellular communication network's Global System for Mobile Communications, global system for mobile communications (GSM). Networks and mobile devices wit ...

UMTS The Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) is a 3G mobile cellular system for networks based on the GSM standard. UMTS uses Wideband Code Division Multiple Access, wideband code-division multiple access (W-CDMA) radio access technolog ...

connection. Maps are cached on the phone memory or memorycard. According to the site, maps can even be downloaded from the site and stored on the phone, once you have registered. A half an hour of navigating uses approximately 200 kb of data or only 8 kb in the so-called Guide view.

Wayfinder Active

Wayfinder Active was a mobile phone

application to track physical outdoor activities. The application calculated exercise statistics such as distance, calories burned and altitude info, so that people could set and track specific exercise goals. Through an online community, activeoutdoor.com, people could track and share local routes within the community. The product was discontinued spring 2009.

Speed cameras

Wayfinder launched the Wayfinder SpeedAlert application in December 2006. The application runs on Java and Symbian 3rd edition only. It warns the user of 15,000 speed cameras around Europe as well as when they exceed a manually set speed limit.

References

External links

* * * * * {{Vodafone Global Positioning System Navigation Navigation system companies Mobile route-planning software Vodafone Pocket PC software