Blaupunkt
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Blaupunkt GmbH (German for "point of blue" or "blue dot") is a German electronic equipment manufacturer, noted for their 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, named after the unique blue dot painted onto its headphones. After the Second World War, Blaupunkt moved their 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 also 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 their strong market position, Blaupunkt has almost always suffered from losses throughout its history and rarely ever managed to make profits. Being a branch of the Robert Bosch Company, the losses have always been covered.
They were also involved in the development of the ARI traffic-information system for car radios and had provided this functionality on their German-market car radios since the late 1970s. They attempted to have ARI in use in the USA but had only a few radio stations per major city involved. Also they had provided this function on most of the car radios that they sold in the USA as part of this project.
They then capitalised on the ARI and Radio Data System traffic-information priority setups by introducing a "Traffic Information Memory" function in some of their 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 capture the traffic report to the unit's built-in memory, then wait for another traffic announcement. There was usually room for four traffic announcements and when the memory is full, the oldest traffic bulletin was deleted.
When the driver came back to the car, they could hear the traffic announcements that they missed simply by pressing a "TIM" button whereupon all the captured announcements that are in the memory are played out. The radio would normally be set up to observe this mode for four hours after the driver turns 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 product aimed at a lower cost market. Audi, Volkswagen, Porsche, Mercedes and BMW all fit Blaupunkt products into their cars, often branded with the manufacturer's own mark (eg The VW Gamma or BMW Symphony lines). Blaupunkt also specialise in coach installations, selling TVs, multiple-speaker setups and PA equipment to that industry.
