Sygic ( ) is a Slovak company of global

automotive navigation system An automotive navigation system is part of the automobile controls or a third party add-on used to find direction in an automobile. It typically uses a satellite navigation device to get its position data which is then correlated to a position on ...

s for

mobile phone A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link whil ...

s and tablets. The company was founded in 2004 and is headquartered in

Bratislava Bratislava (, also ; ; german: Preßburg/Pressburg ; hu, Pozsony) is the Capital city, capital and largest city of Slovakia. Officially, the population of the city is about 475,000; however, it is estimated to be more than 660,000 — approxim ...

, Slovakia. It became the first company to offer navigation for iPhone and second for Android. In 2015 Sygic reached milestone of 100 million downloads of its navigation app.

History

The company was founded in 2004 by Michal Štencl, Martin Kališ, and Peter Pecho with Michal Štencl serving as company CEO since then. In 2009 Sygic became the first company worldwide to offer GPS navigation for iPhone. In 2015 company reached milestone of 100 million downloads of its navigation app. In 2016 Sygic made an acquisition of Czech startup Tripomatic to expand its services to travel planning and travel management.

Overview

Sygic navigation systems work on mobile phones and tablets with

GPS The Global Positioning System (GPS), originally Navstar GPS, is a Radionavigation-satellite service, satellite-based radionavigation system owned by the United States government and operated by the United States Space Force. It is one of t ...

and use screen and audio signals to provide door-to-door information for well-oriented travel, live traffic & police radar/speed camera warnings, parking place, and gas prices suggestions. Sygic GPS navigation focuses on its wide usability. It can be used both online and offline, runs on Android
Android Auto

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...

Windows Phone Windows Phone (WP) is a discontinued family of mobile operating systems developed by Microsoft for smartphones as the replacement successor to Windows Mobile and Zune. Windows Phone featured a new user interface derived from the Metro design la ...

and

Symbian Symbian is a discontinued mobile operating system A mobile operating system is an operating system for mobile phones, tablets, smartwatches, smartglasses, or other non-laptop personal mobile computing devices. While computers such as typic ...

operating systems, offers maps for more than 200 countries in the world and operates in more than 30 languages. Sygic navigation uses 2D & 3D maps from

TomTom TomTom N.V. is a Dutch multinational developer and creator of location technology and consumer electronics. Founded in 1991 and headquartered in Amsterdam, TomTom released its first generation of satellite navigation devices to market in 2004. ...

for both online and offline use. Users of Sygic GPS navigation can download maps to their devices and use them when they need navigation but have no internet connection. Sygic optimizes data download sizes to allow users to use maps offline while using the minimum amount of memory on their devices. Sygic delivers its GPS software worldwide in more than 30 languages, including

Chinese Chinese can refer to: * Something related to China * Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity **''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation ** List of ethnic groups in China, people of ...

Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic languages, Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C ...

Persian Persian may refer to: * People and things from Iran, historically called ''Persia'' in the English language ** Persians, the majority ethnic group in Iran, not to be conflated with the Iranic peoples ** Persian language, an Iranian language of the ...

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

Russian Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including: *Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...

and many

European languages Most languages of Europe belong to the Indo-European language family. Out of a total European population of 744 million as of 2018, some 94% are native speakers of an Indo-European language. Within Indo-European, the three largest phyla are Rom ...

. In 2016 Sygic created a translation project on Crowdin "dedicated to localization of Sygic app to all languages". Project localization is open to the public that can contribute to Catalan, Urdu, Persian, Malay, Tamil, Latvian and other languages. Real-time traffic information is based on TomTom Traffic. Traffic information is collected from more than 400 million drivers and updated every 2 minutes. "''GPS data is collected from connected personal navigation devices (PNDs), commercial fleet GPS devices, mobile phone signals, road sensors, journalistic data, smartphones and car dashboard systems.''" Users do not report anything - the data is collected automatically and anonymously.

Privacy

NRK NRK, an abbreviation of the Norwegian ''Norsk Rikskringkasting Aksjeselskap, AS'', generally expressed in English as the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, is the Norwegian government-owned radio and television public broadcasting company, and ...

(Norwegian national broadcasting service) published a report about Sygic sharing data with data brokers lik
Gravy Analytics
part o
Ventell
for purposes like fraud detection, law enforcement, and national security.

GDPR The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a European Union regulation on data protection and privacy in the EU and the European Economic Area (EEA). The GDPR is an important component of EU privacy law and of human rights law, in partic ...

is setting strict limits and requirements for what companies can do with our personal information. According to lawyers, this is in violation of the GDPR. However, nor Gravy Analytics nor Ventell are partners of Sygic, and there is no proof of the fact that the source of the data referred to was Sygic.

Awards

Sygic has been cited by

Deloitte Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (), commonly referred to as Deloitte, is an international professional services network headquartered in London, England. Deloitte is the largest professional services network by revenue and number of profession ...

as the: * 6th Technology Fastest-growing Technology Company in Central & Eastern Europe for the years 2007 and 2008 * 2nd Technology Fastest-growing Technology Company in Central & Eastern Europe for the year 2009 * 3rd Technology Fastest-growing Technology Company in Central & Eastern Europe for the year 2010 and #143 in EMEA Additionally, there are: * Global Champion Award 2021 awarded by the Emerging Europe Platform * Superbrands Slovakia Award 2021 from Superbrands Brand Council * Top CES (

Consumer Electronics Show CES (; formerly an initialism for Consumer Electronics Show) is an annual trade show organized by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA). Held in January at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Winchester, Nevada, United States, the event typi ...

) Innovation Award 2020 for Real-time Traffic Lights in Sygic GPS Navigation * Innovation Radar Prize 2018 for Sygic’s intelligent routing algorithm

Memberships

Coalition for App Fairness The Coalition for App Fairness (CAF) is a coalition comprised by companies who aim to reach a fairer deal for the inclusion of their apps into the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store. The organization's executive director is Meghan DiMuzio ...

* CharIN Association

References