Before May 2000, civilian GPS systems were accurate to within only 100 metres only the military could get its “full” accuracy of a few metres. ![]() The company then saw an opportunity to make mapping devices for consumers. “It was very difficult to put everything into one product we had a city product, but we were already very good at compressing data so we could fit it in.” Smartphones were not yet in use.Īt first, it wrote mapping applications for the handhelds, squeezing data into tiny (by today’s standards) amounts of storage. Initially, it made business-facing products for meter reading and barcodes for the popular handhelds – Palm Pilot, Compaq iPaq and Psion Series 5. After four years at Psion – “it was one of the most interesting tech startups around we learned a lot, there was a bunch of smart people” – she moved to Holland to join a software distributor for the Psion and other handhelds, and then helped set up TomTom in 1991. But the rise of mobile phones pushed it to a software-only path: its Symbian software became the basis of the first successful range of smartphones, from Nokia. Psion was a stalwart of British technology, producing a much loved handheld computer series that rivalled the Palm, from the US, in the 1990s. “North Africa, Israel, Europe,” she said, having joined Psion from business school in 1987. She travelled widely, which was her original aim in getting into business. Her first managerial role was running exports at Psion, the iconic and hugely influential British technology company, in the 1990s. Shares hit an all-time low of €2.84.įor Vigreux, however, reinvention and building from the ground up is what she is used to. At the start of 2009, the company wrote off more than €1bn on the Tele Atlas purchase. Its shares plunged from their high of €64.80. US-based Garmin tried to snatch Tele Atlas, but a brief bidding war saw TomTom prevail with a €2.9bn bid the deal closed in June 2008.īut the stock market did not like TomTom’s purchase, which was funded by debt and a new share issue. In October 2007, Nokia bid €5.7bn for Navteq, the other independent. In July 2007, it made a €2bn offer for Tele Atlas, the company’s map data supplier, which was one of only two independent mapping companies (and also supplied Google). TomTom had already decided that the future lay in providing map data and telematics for vehicle makers. Every company starts with a blank sheet of paper, and some of them then arrive like a tsunami.”įor TomTom, survival would quickly become a matter of adapting to the new reality, in which Google could undermine the paid-for satnav business – which was then selling millions of units each quarter – with software that would quickly be in everyone’s hands. ![]() Hilton Hotels would never have expected their margins would be eaten away by Airbnb. But Vigreux, 50, has seen enough change in the technology business to know that “your competitors come from different fields – they’re not the ones you expect them to be. As a Silver Certified Application Developer, Solvusoft is able to provide the highest level of customer satisfaction through delivering top-level software and service solutions, which have been subject to a rigorous and continually-audited approval process by Microsoft.The arrival of a search engine company in the field of in-car navigation is not the sort of threat you would normally plan for. To achieve a Silver competency level, Solvusoft goes through extensive independent analysis that looks for, amongst other qualities, a high level of software expertise, a successful customer service track record, and top-tier customer value. How is the Silver Competency Level Attained? La estrecha relación de Solvusoft con Microsoft como Silver Certified Partner nos permite proporcionar las mejores soluciones de software optimizadas para su funcionamiento en sistemas operativos Windows. Solvusoft ha sido reconocido por Microsoft como un proveedor líder de software independiente, y ha alcanzado el más alto nivel de competencia y excelencia en el desarrollo de software. Solvusoft: Microsoft Silver Certified Company Reconocido por las excelentes capacidades como un ISV (Proveedores de software independientes)
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