MapIT MD Ray Wilkinson expects 200 000 navigation devices will be sold in SA this year, up from 90 000 last year - most with digital maps provided by his Pretoria-based company.
"The personal navigation market has an estimated worth of R700 million in SA alone," he adds.
"Internationally, the navigation market has been broken down into three sections: personal digital assistant, personal navigation devices (PND) and smartphone navigation," Wilkinson says.
"International trends are seeing PND and smartphone navigation take off. With Africa's burgeoning mobile industry, we expect SA to follow suit."
The first smartphones with built-in GPS will hit the market this year and Wilkinson expects such devices, loaded with appropriate mapping software, will be widely used by visitors during the 2010 Soccer World Cup. "The key is to give visitors the ability to plan [their movements] ahead of time," he says.
MapIT is a joint venture between Map Studio (51%) and global geospatial solutions company Georigin (49%), which has internationally-focused engineering, programming and geographic information systems skills. MapIT has exclusive electronic rights to the MapStudio map database compiled over the last 50 years.
Mapping Africa
MapIT is developing digital maps of SA's rural areas, using satellite and aerial photography as the basis.
Wilkinson says the company's focus is now to complete the building of a seamless map database for Africa. GSM providers across the continent already rely on MapIT products for network planning.
In late 2006, MapIT had a field team in Nouakchott, Mauritania, to confirm mapping data derived from aerial photography and to add points of interest. The company was also translating and updating Russian-language maps of neighbouring Niger.
A national road atlas has been published for Nigeria and a detailed street map of Lagos compiled. Detailed street maps for southern and east Africa are already available and are being used by Garmin and TeleAtlas. In mapping Africa, MapIT is receiving "a lot of support from international organisations", Wilkinson says, although he believes the task will be never-ending.
However, by year-end he expects enough data will be available for a PND user to safely navigate from Cape to Cairo.
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