In April 2010 I published a ticket to locate the main actors of the electronic charting. Time passing, this information should be refreshed, due to recent business movements. Some have disappeared, as Maptech, more recently Fugawi, others have changed hands, an update is necessary.
Thunderbolt this 27 October 2017, Navionics charts was acquired by Garmin (¹) ! The last private publisher to remain independent, until today in the hand of the Italian founder Giuseppe Carnevali, passes into the portfolio of the multinational company Garmin, shortly after the purchase of the global database Active Captain. The cards are redistributed once again…
By adding Navionics charts to its own BlueChart charts, Garmin takes the first place among private publishers and thus recovers a huge customer base. It remains to be seen what will change for users. Garmin, In its press release, Ensures :
" …we plan to retain the Navionics brand and will continue to support Navionics' existing customers. ”
But the fact remains that Garmin becomes de facto provider of key competitors, mainly Raymarine, but also Furuno or Navico. This may be difficult to manage. Mark Messerli in the USA, on his excellent blog i-Marine Apps, does not fail to worry about it in a detailed and well-argued way.
The purchase of C-Map by Altor investment fund to Jeppesen (Boeing group) in May 2016 has already been mentioned recently in this blog. It allows to bring back in Europe one of the leaders of the private charting that will be closely associated with the Group Navico, and its three brands of marine electronics Simrad, B&G and Lowrance.
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(¹) https://www.garmin.com/en-US/blog/fishandhunt/garmin-acquires-navionics-marine-charts/
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Bonjour,
it was Navionics that had started the battle by making its charts usable (SD and micro SD) in March 2015 on Garmin equipment by revolving around the protections of the manufacturer Garmin .
This is essentially to retrieve data from probes made by users to update Sonarcharts maps. A war has broken out between lawyers. An out-of-court settlement ensued, with the obligation to respect Garmin's locks, so the activation of the Navionics card through a Garmin G2 card.
This has resulted in, Bringing together the technical and management teams, the result of which we are seeing at the moment.
What Garmin is interested in are the SONARChart maps coupled with remote sensing of the seabed by satellites, Optimized for fishing, from Navionics that will be inserted into Garmin's hardware/software/maps.
The "little" Boating app also falls into the bride's basket, no news on it yet.
Francis
The fact that the main map publishers are linked to hardware manufacturers can obviously raise fears of forced updates (and paid) with each evolution of the hardware and vice versa with cards that may only be readable on the latest version of the readers…
" … There shouldn't be any noticeable changes from the end-user's perspective – at least not for the foreseeable future. ”…
after a good week of desperately looking for my cards, I'm a little afraid of the rest of the foreseeable future.
(since yesterday 21/04/16 everything is back to normal…Hope)