Blaupunkt

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Blaupunkt GmbH (German for "point of blue" or "blue dot") is a German electronic equipment manufacturer, noted for its home and car audio equipment. It is a 100% subsidiary of Robert Bosch GmbH. Founded in 1923 in Berlin as "Ideal", the company changed its name to "Blaupunkt" in 1938, after the blue dot painted onto its headphones. After the Second World War, Blaupunkt moved its headquarters and production to the town of Hildesheim.

During the 1960 and 1970s, Blaupunkt had become the leading German manufacturer for car radios and car audio equipment.

Blaupunkt can be considered the first manufacturer of a GPS (Global Positioning System) based in-car navigation system (the Berlin RC303), which has become one of the company's best selling products. Despite its strong market position, Blaupunkt has throughout its history rarely managed to make a profit, its losses being borne by its parent company, Robert Bosch.

Blaupunkt was involved in the development of the Autofahrer-Rundfunk-Informationssystem (ARI) traffic-information system for car radios and provided this feature on their German-market car radios from the late 1970s. The company attempted to have ARI used in the USA but had only a few radio stations per major city involved.

It then capitalised on the ARI and Radio Data System traffic-information priority setups by introducing a "Traffic Information Memory" function in some of its high-end and mid-range car radios. This function had the radio on a "standby" mode whereupon it would listen for a traffic-announcement signal from the currently-tuned station. Once it detected this signal, it would retain the traffic report in its memory, then wait for another one. There was usually room for four traffic announcements and when the memory became full the oldest one was overwritten. When the driver came back to the car, he or she could hear these traffic announcemensts simply by pressing the "TIM" button. The radio would normally be set up to operate in this mode for four hours after the driver turned off the ignition, but could be set to start monitoring after a user-defined time, such as close to breakfast time in order to avoid missing the morning traffic reports.

For many years, Blaupunkt car audio equipment models often carried the name of a city somewhere in the world, eg "London RDM126". In Blaupunkt model nomenclature, this can be translated as "An RDS CD player capable of controlling a Multichanger, rated at 4x30W RMS (4x30 = 120) from model year 1996". High-end models typically had German place names.

Blaupunkt also used the brand "Velocity" to sell products aimed at a lower cost market. Audi, Volkswagen, Porsche, Mercedes and BMW all fit Blaupunkt products into their cars, often branded with the car manufacturer's own mark (eg The VW Gamma or BMW Symphony lines). Blaupunkt also specialises in coach installations, selling TVs, multiple-speaker setups and PA equipment to that industry.