French speaking online and mobile mapping portal Mappy is introducing today a turn-by-turn navigation application on the iTunes store. Mappy Navigation costs €49.99 for France or for Benelux and €84.99 for the whole of Europe.

The on-board application, customized to the Mappy brand, is powered by mobile navigation provider NDrive and uses NAVTEQ map data.

Mappy currently enjoys strong brand equity on the French and Belgium markets with 10.8 million unique visitors to its website and 20 million page views per month (Google Maps is around 13 million unique visitors in France). Mappy also recorded over 600,000 downloads of its iPhone mapping application launched last year.

“After screening the marketplace for navigation solution we concluded that NDrive technology was the best suited both in terms of their development capabilities and the quality of the technology itself”, said Henri Moché, CEO at Mappy, in a phone interview with GPS Business News.

Mappy already entered the mobile navigation market in 2007 and gave up in 2008 at a time where mobile navigation - and especially off-board – had difficulties to take off in Europe. This time the subsidiary of the directory provider PagesJaunes Groupe believes that the opportunity is substantial on the iPhone platform.

“NDrive also has capabilities on other platforms such as Android, Windows Mobile or Symbian, so we have the potential to extend this offer to other phones too,” added Moché.

The company also has a PND that wears its name - under a brand licensing agreement – and that is the number four player in France after TomTom, Garmin and Mio.

This new iPhone turn-by-turn application is however not leveraging all the assets Mappy could have brought to the navigation game. With a parent company such as PagesJaunes we could have expected a build-in local search for business and people rather than the standard NAVTEQ POI data. Same thing applies for the hotel reservation system that Mappy recently launched on their website – in partnership with booking.com – having it on the iPhone application could have been a nice differentiator and generating additional revenue.

Not worried by “Free”
Mappy seems to be well aware of the trend towards free navigation launched by Google (in the US) and Nokia (all over the world) but do not feel too worried. “Unlike Google we have an on-board navigation system which is much faster and do not cost you anything if you are roaming”, said Moché. He also believes that the weight of the iPhone in France is so big that Nokia’s free navigation will have little impact on his iPhone business.

However, in the long run Moché recognizes that navigation will tend to be “partially free”. He thinks that a “freemium” model could become a reality. But today “customers are willing to pay for navigation” he added.

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