Telenav fuels search for cheaper gas prices

28.04.2006
As gas prices across the U.S. reach record highs, consumers can turn to technology to help find the most affordable gas prices in any area.

One such application, Fuel Finder, is offered by TeleNav Inc., a provider of mobile GPS navigation services, located in Santa Clara, Calif.

Fuel Finder is bundled with TeleNav's navigation service and enables motorists to find the most affordable gas station nearby. The service automatically searches fuel prices within five miles of a user's location, and can search further if nothing is found, according to the company. The fuel prices are updated daily and the search results are sorted for prices of 87 octane gas. Users can also search by gasoline brand name.

'Telenav is a turn-by-turn GPS system for mobile phones -- one of our services is called a business finder and inside of that is our cheap gas finder. What happens is you would click [BizFinder] on your phone and it would read your GPS location ... and then it would find the nearest cheapest gas,' said Telenav spokesman Salman Dhanani. He said the gas price information is obtained through an aggregator. Gas prices are updated each day at midnight, he said.

Dhanani said a user would start up Telenav, click on BizFinder and then click on gas by price.

'Once you do that, the phone knows where you are, and then it comes back to our Internet server and it says this person is looking for cheap gas around this location. Our server has the prices for gas for about 70 percent of gas stations in the U.S.,' he said. 'We then match the nearest gas stations and we look at all the prices and show you the cheapest one first. Then you can click and say 'take me there' and it will talk you through to that gas station.'