Peter-Frans Pauwels is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of TomTom, currently the world’s largest navigation solution provider. TomTom entered hyper growth in 2001 when flash memory became affordable and GPS more accurate. Revenues reached over 1,4 billion Euro in 2006. TomTom's products are developed with an emphasis on innovation, quality, and include all-in-one navigation devices which enable customers to navigate right out of the box.

As a Passion Award winner, Dr. Novick will receive a solid gold Frederique Constant watch from the Heart Beat Manufacture collection and will be offered a Business Case Study by Prof. Dominique Turpin of IMD Lausanne.

In 1991 Peter-Frans Pauwels and Pieter Geelen, both recently graduated from Amsterdam University, founded a business called Palmtop to develop applications for the first generation of handheld computers. In those days, most applications were for business use, but soon, with the success of the Psion Series 3 range, it became clear that ordinary people wanted personal organizers, and they renamed the business Palmtop and started developing lightweight commercial applications that ranged from dictionaries and personal finance products to games and route planners.

To sell these applications globally, Corinne Vigreux joined them from Psion in 1994. The handheld market expanded and diversified fast, particularly following the launch of the hugely successful Palm Pilot in 1996, and the appearance of the first Microsoft-based devices. Palmtop designed applications for all of them.

By the end of the 90s, the market was getting too big for a single company to excel in every field. With clear potential to integrate with the newly available GPS (Global Positioning System) services, which could tell your location anywhere on Earth, the navigation field showed exciting potential. Palmtop started to focus more and more on navigation solutions like route planners and dictionaries. And other developments were opening up even greater mobile opportunities.

In 1998 Psion decided to transform their operating system into Symbian, the OS (Operating System) of choice for mobile phones. The Palmtop team helped develop Symbian, and gained valuable experience in the areas of mobile communications, smartphones, and mass-scale client-server architectures.

In 2001, Harold Goddijn became the fourth full partner. As former CEO of Psion, he added the necessary breadth of vision to grow the company on the one hand, and focus it on the other. A new name was needed to show our new focus, and we decided we liked the name TomTom. TomTom used all its strengths to making the the first truly mobile in-car navigation solution: TomTom Navigator. TomTom Navigator was a huge success.

By the time TomTom NAVIGATOR 2 hit the market in the spring of 2003, it was clear that the need to go from A to B the easy way went way beyond PDA owners. Other people needed to navigate, and they would need a single product that was very, very easy to use. Like a map, or asking a local, it shouldn't need a manual. TomTom managed to convince Mark Gretton, former CTO of Psion and creator of the original Psion Series 3, to join TomTom, build a top-notch hardware team, and develop an all-in-one navigation product.

Alexander Ribbink, former vice president of brand development at Mars Inc, joined TomTom in November 2003 to drive the marketing of our growing range of products. TomTom GO, the easiest to use and most portable stand-alone car navigation device ever, was introduced in the spring of 2004. In the autumn we launched TomTom MOBILE, a new navigation solution designed to turn smartphones into in-car navigators.

Despite the global reach of our products, our business is still quite small with a family feel, but growing fast and always on the lookout for talent. TomTom is totally international in outlook, but informal in the way we do things. Like our customers, we still manage to get where we want to go fast. At the moment, we have offices in Amsterdam, London, and Massachusetts.

TomTom likes to keep in contact with our customers. If you encounter any problems, have any questions or just want to tell us how fantastic our products are, please feel free to contact us, whatever the subject, and we will get back to you. We hope you find happiness and fulfillment, as well as your destination.

Some experts say that language may have begun with drumming, and simple drums like the double-headed Native American tom-tom and the talking drums of Africa, have always been used for signaling, imitating the pitch patterns of language and transmitting messages over many miles. Just like us. And like TomTom products, the tom-tom is simple but versatile, reliable and fun to use.

More information: www.tomtom.com