While Nobeltec is now owned by Furuno I don't know how it's business model will survive as MAXSEA's step child when Nobletec does not seem to have the robust commerical software market the Furuno and CE have.
I can bring some facts here about corporate ownership with all of this. I know the owners. It's a little complex.
There is a French company called MaxSea who has been writing boat navigation products for decades. They were founded by Bryce Pryszo in the 80's who's an incredibly bright guy - he developed much of their original products and had a great business sense for positioning and marketing. He's one of the masters/grandfathers of navigation software much like Steve Jobs holds that place for personal computers.
About 5-6 years ago, Bryce's company was going strong and MaxSea was on version 10 or 11. They had introduced some of the most interesting concepts in navigation like the ability to use weather prediction to automatically create routing for sailboats. They had Windows and Macintosh versions of their software. Most of us in the US had less exposure to the product because they were European even though there were English versions of it.
Around this time, MaxSea had some incredible software developers who knew how to use the newer GPU's present in PC's. These are specialty chips that offloaded graphics control from the CPU to provide better graphics (and often 3D) performance. I can only imagine how excited they were when they realized this new capability could be applied to navigation software with performance unlike anything seen.
MaxSea showed the new capabilities to Furuno and a matchup between the two companies was formed. Furuno saw this as their future and moved their entire product line to embedded Windows hardware with MaxSea running as the software. They called this Time Zero implying the speed of rendering charts in this new world. I'm not easy to get blown away but I was totally blown away the first time I saw it. After writing navigation software myself for a decade, I hadn't been able to imagine the performance improvements they demonstrated with one new product.
With such a commitment by Furuno to offload their entire chartplotter line to another software company, they needed some ownership in the company. Bryce came up with a nice solution. A parent company called Signet SA was formed. Signet would own MaxSea, MapMedia (the chart company), and other acquisitions. 49% of Signet would be owned by Furuno.
Around this time I met Iker, Bryce's son. Iker is managing most of the software efforts of the company now. He's incredibly quick and a good software developer himself. It was Iker that I pitched the idea of adding ActiveCaptain to their product about 4-5 years ago. Iker got the whole thing immediately and made the integration happen. MaxSea was the first ActiveCaptain licensee. I get together with Iker at every trade show these days and I love talking about the industry and what's possible. He's unusual in his vision and he's providing great leadership at MaxSea.
MapMedia is worth mentioning too. It's part of Signet. They have the most comprehensive collection of chart data that exists. They directly license C-Map, Navionics, and government-produced charts. Then they process the data in their own format to produce MapMedia files that they sell. So software that uses MapMedia can choose among different types of charts from different manufacturers. The real reason for this new chart format is that there is a tremendous amount of pre-processing of the data to give the incredible performance capabilities of MaxSea/Furuno in a way that can allow display of all different chart types. Because of this processing, Joe is right, you have to wait until they release a chart update. They make updates every 6 months. Since this exact format is used by Furuno chartplotters, you can bet that they've hit that interval every time and will continue to do that. Updates to their NOAA raster and vector data have always been free for US versions. But none of the raw NOAA BSB or S-57 chart data files can be viewed directly - it has to wait for MapMedia processing. There are advantages and disadvantages to this. But recognize that there are big companies behind it so the risk is much less than if a smaller software developer were making a new chart file type.
Nobeltec had been bought and sold many times over the years. It's a shame. It was created in the mid-90's by a fantastic developer named Dave Steckler. He had the first real, released product that could quilt together raster charts into a seamless view. It was magic at the time and changed everything for navigation software because it no longer meant having to navigate chart-to-chart, falling off the edge as you approached it. I was lucky to live 35 miles from Dennis Mills at the time who I got to know. Dennis developed and sold a product called The Cap'n. Nobeltec sent The Cap'n down a slide that it was never going to recover from. In my opinion, Dennis was an OK developer - it wasn't his passion and he sort of fell into being a developer because he wanted the product for his own use. This new age of Nobeltec had high-end developers dedicated to writing fantastic software with new capabilities that Dennis couldn't match. That said, Dennis is certainly another grandfather of this industry that most people have never heard of. Maptech experienced a similar slide (I wrote 3 products that Maptech sold exclusively) - I got to see the internals of their explosion which is another valuable story - who knew they were funded by the owner of Land's End?
Anyway, Dave Steckler cashed out, bought a plane, and I believe he's out flying around the Puget Sounds these days. Nobeltec was eventually owned by C-Map. C-Map was purchased by Jeppesen. Jeppesen was purchased by Boeing. The result of all of this was that the heart of Nobeltec was gone. Then a couple of years ago, Signet decided that perhaps Nobeltec was a way to get into the US market in a bigger way. Nobeltec did pretty well previously in the US but never had a strong presence in Europe. MaxSea was just the opposite marketing-wise.
So Signet purchased Nobeltec and retired their older, problematic software (VNS, which had a huge US following with Joe as an example). Trident and Odyssey were rebranded MaxSea Time Zero software with a US slant. And while MaxSea supported Furuno networks, radars, and other specialty Furuno hardware, Nobeltec would be more open and have other radar and instrument support. Mostly though, I think Nobeltec is MaxSea's marketing arm for the US market. It's not a bad strategy and everyone involved that I've met is truly dedicated to producing great products. Nobeltec and both Trident/Odyssey are licensees of ActiveCaptain today too.
So there is some Furuno ownership with the parent company. But if anything, that provides a great deal of stability as all of this moves forward.
Looking forward, MaxSea/Nobeltec recently released iPad versions of their software. This is quite interesting too - and it's a free download which everyone should try. The Nobeltec version has detailed demo charts for Miami so you can see what it's all about. It turns out that iPads have the same type of GPU found on PC's today. MaxSea developers expanded their software to writing specialty software for that GPU to take advantage of the 3D and graphic performance of the chip. The result is pretty incredible.
