Redlands, California― ESRI is a sponsor for the LBS Challenge, an annual competition that provides developers with an opportunity to showcase their location-based solutions and win a variety of prizes including up to $50,000 in cash from NAVTEQ and data licenses from ESRI. Contest participants looking to build winning solutions can sign up for no-cost access to ArcWeb Services, ESRI’s hosted Web services mapping and geographic information system (GIS) application programming interfaces (APIs).

“Mobile application developers who choose ESRI’s ArcWeb Services can be more successful in reaching their objective,” says Randy Frantz, telecommunications and LBS solutions manager for ESRI. “Because the APIs go well beyond basic maps and directions, these developers will be able to focus on solving business problems rather than having to spend precious development cycles building complex mapping functionality from scratch.”

Developers use the ArcWeb Services APIs for integrating mapping functionality and geographic content into mobile, browser, and server applications to help solve business problems such as best-route delivery planning or advanced vehicle tracking that includes off-route or out-of-service-area alarms.

Contest entrants register solutions in one of five categories: Enterprise, Entertainment/Leisure, Navigation, Social Networking, or Third-Party Content. Prizes for the winners include cash and licenses for the use of NAVTEQ data and ESRI’s ArcWeb Services as well as offerings from other sponsors. Nine past LBS Challenge winners have launched commercial applications on major wireless carriers, and eight previous LBS Challenge participants received venture capital funding.

Winners will be announced at the CTIA Wireless 2008 show, held April 1–3, 2008, in Las Vegas, Nevada. Registration for the North America LBS challenge closes December 7, 2007. To sign up, visit www.esri.com/lbschallenge.


About ESRI

Since 1969, ESRI has been giving customers around the world the power to think and plan geographically. The market leader in GIS, ESRI software is used in more than 300,000 organizations worldwide including each of the 200 largest cities in the United States, most national governments, more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, and more than 7,000 colleges and universities. ESRI applications, running on more than one million desktops and thousands of Web and enterprise servers, provide the backbone for the world’s mapping and spatial analysis. ESRI is the only vendor that provides complete technical solutions for desktop, mobile, server, and Internet platforms. Visit www.esri.com.