Ashu Pande And Dan Hight Join @NextNav
NextNav LLC, the leader in 3D geolocation services, today announced the addition of two new executives to its leadership team as it delivers next generation location infrastructure to serve public safety, critical infrastructure and a wide range of commercial applications.
Ashutosh (Ashu) Pande joins as Vice President and General Manager of Metropolitan Beacon System (MBS) Services and Dan Hight joins as Vice President and General Manager of Data Partnerships.
NextNav is deploying a new nationwide Z-Axis service that offers precise altitude determination (less than three meters) enabling floor-level determination in major urban markets across the country. The Z-Axis service will provide the vertical dimension to traditional latitude/longitude services enabling everything from better COVID-19 contact tracing to creation of more accurate location based audiences and attribution services. As previously announced, NextNav is allowing COVID-19 contact tracing applications use of NextNav Z-Axis free of charge.
- Dan Hight, well known and when liked in our industry, was prior to NextNav, an executive at GroundTruth and advisor to media companies, technology platforms and associations. While at GroundTruth, he was instrumental in securing strategic partnerships with iHeart Media, Cox Media Group, OUTFRONT Media, Live Nation, Univision and Rubicon Project. A location media veteran, he has created strategic partnerships for the past 20 years.
- Ashu Pande brings with him deep experience of the mobile telecommunications and geospatial industry. A location industry veteran with over 50 patents in GPS, he has evangelized the use of GPS by consumers, drove receiver miniaturization, pioneered its adoption in mobile phones and shipped GPS chipset in 10’s of millions to handset leaders including Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola and RIM. While at SiRF (later acquired by CSR and subsequently Qualcomm), Pande worked with operators, privacy groups, handset vendors and digital map providers to make GPS available as a simple to use API delivering Location, Context and Motion dynamics to applications developers, heralding the beginning of ‘user selectable’ Location Based Services.
NextNav is also building out a ground based MBS infrastructure that will provide outdoor and indoor 3D positioning and help solve the inaccuracy of GPS in dense urban areas. Further, NextNav is commercializing technology that serves as a backup to GPS, ensuring uninterrupted operation of critical infrastructure. A NIST sponsored study by RTI International, estimated that the economic impacts to the U.S. economy caused by a 30-day loss of GPS would be $1 billion per day and could be 50 percent higher if the disruptions occurred at the least opportune time.
NextNav’s revolutionary Metropolitan Beacon System (MBS)-based services enable mobile phones, autonomous vehicles and IoT devices to reliably provide Position, Navigation and Timing Services (PNT) and serve as a backup to GPS in indoor and urban metropolitan environments. Delivered over a managed terrestrial network with carrier-grade dependability and metropolitan-wide coverage, NextNav’s services are designed for public safety applications, E911, PNT services for Critical Infrastructure, as well as a multitude of consumer, IoT and commercial applications that require reliable 3D geolocation and timing services indoors and in urban areas.
Categories: Scuttlebut
