Mr. Jean-Pierre Mascarelli, President of Team Côte d’Azur, and Senator Pierre Laffitte, President of the Sophia Antipolis Foundation, are pleased to announce the participation of Nice-Sophia Antipolis, as the only French gateway to the European Satellite Navigation Competition 2009

For many years, the regions of the Alpes-Maritimes and Bavaria have maintained close ties at institutional, economic and cultural level. It was thus quite natural that Bavaria invited the Côte d’Azur’s technological and scientific community to participate for the 5th year running, in the European competition to produce ideas for future products/services applications in the field of satellite navigation.

After Airbus and Ariane, GALILEO is the largest and most ambitious technological program to be undertaken by the European Union over the next few years. The investments involved, totalling about 3.5 billion euros, are expected to create over 100,000 jobs in Europe.

Galileo facing a market size of 1.8 billion users by 2010 and 3.6 billlion users by 2020. Since 2005, sales of personal navigation devices (PNDs) have soared to over 20 million and over 180 million mobile phones now feature GNSS capabilities.

These markets have experienced a real boom and this effect is seen in many sectors. This is creating many business opportunities for satellite navigation applications developpers.

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