Mr Shankar Narayanan, former co-founder of eMuzed, which introduced the full motion video into the mobile phones and was subsequently acquired by Flextronics in the US, has now floated a new venture to tap the emerging opportunities offered by the GPS (Global Positioning System) space. His venture, Spime, seeks to create a platform that will enable consumers to identify and track anything, anywhere in the world. While Spime will be based in California, bulk of the operations will be done out of Chennai through its wholly-owned subsidiary, Spime India.

Initial technology development efforts are said to be underway here with a 15-member team of pure play technologists. This is expected to touch 100 by the year end. Mr Shankar Narayanan, founder and CEO, Spime said that every decade or so, there has been a technology revolution that impacted human life. If PCs changed the way, how one computes, the Internet changed the way, the business is carried out around the globe by removing boundaries.

“Same is true with mobile phones, which impacted the way we communicate and share the moments. Now “Location intelligence” (LI) is going to have a greater impact and that's the reason why we want to focus on it” he said.
He claimed GPS is picking up in North America, Europe and Japan, where almost all the high end cars have GPS in them. “While such an onboard navigation system gets into the car, newer portable navigation devices which can be carried on person, are emerging on scene. And cellular service providers are too trying to offer a primitive navigation feature.” Mr Shankar Narayanan said. Spime's primary goal is to identify, track, navigate and use the location-based services to empower the consumers to track anything anywhere in the world. “While the technology is available, the required infrastructure is not available now. Spime will create a platform that will enable GPS, cell ID, Wi-Fi, RFID to function under one stack” he said.

The Spime client, given its tin architecture, can sit in any of the portable devices and it can talk to Spime application servers around the globe. This enables anyone to track anything, which in turn opens up a huge opportunity for business around the world.

To facilitate faster development and progress, Spime has become a Microsoft embedded partner. IT has joined hands with deCarta, a map reading engine company and with Navteq, a company that provides map data. It has also signed NDA with Texas Instruments to port Spime applications on to TI chips, which enables GPS functionality in cell phones and other mobile devices.