Well, after a bustling 3 days of jam-packed meetings, pitches, and pow-wow sessions, we are finally settled back in Chicago. CTIA was an overwhelming, but great experience. Obviously, we are very excited to have won the Navteq LBS Challenge Navigation Category. Navteq and its sponsors were amazing and I highly encourage anyone with a LBS application to think about entering this competition. It’s great in terms of developing your product and the judges really provide some great feedback on what they think works and what does not.

We made some great friends at the LBS Challenge and hope to continue working with them, including the category winner of business applications, Jentro. Jentro is having a pretty good year as they just came from the 3GSM Conference in Barcelona where they won the European LBS Challenge Grand Prize. Jentro’s activepilot is the leading location-based end-to-end solution, offering local search, community tools, e911, and offboard navigation. They recently opened an office in Chicago, so we’ll be seeing them quite a bit now. They have a great platform and it’s no surprise they won their category, despite some stiff competition from the likes of loopt, which also has an amazing interface and userbase. We also want to mention our friends at Ten 23 Software, Chris and Chris, whose SpotKast app keeps your phone updated with the information relevant to users, helping them to save time and read their favorite web content, find a place to eat, avoid traffic jams, and find friends quickly through one easy to use interface. We’re hoping to get our parking information on their platform soon.

Aside from the competition, the CTIA convention was great as well. Although we missed out on seeing George Bush and Bill Clinton give their keynotes (due to hectic schedules), we met numerous carriers and providers who seem excited to work with ParkWhiz. Everyone seems to recognize what a pain parking can be and after seeing our app in motion, they all think we are on to something. The weather was gorgeous, albeit a bit windy, but overall was a nice break from the cold. We’re looking forward to next year’s CTIA and hope to return as contestants to the Navteq LBS Challenge with our eyes set on winning the grand prize!

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