Interesting Snippets

Why would people continue to pay $10 a month for TeleNav’s service when Google offers a free version? Let’s start with that last issue. Dhanani argued the price is a virtue rather than a disadvantage. People assume that something you have to pay for has a higher quality than something you get for free, he said. And when it comes to a service like navigation, many users consider it critical and are willing to pay a premium for something they can depend on. Like so many of its other products, Google still lists its mobile navigation service as being in “beta,” a word that implies in the mind of many users something that’s still less than reliable and under development, Dhanani said. Dhanani also noted that because navigation is TeleNav’s sole focus, it’s continually updating the service and adding features. Google, by comparison, just updated its mobile navigation product this week for the first time since launching it last year. And finally, Google’s application remains available only on some handsets that run the latest version of its Android operating system. TeleNav has exclusive arrangements with several major carriers who sell phones that come with TeleNav’s service installed, giving it a much wider potential user base. As a result, TeleNav added another 2 million subscribers in the first quarter of this year, bringing its total to 14.5 million