This is the one. If you can code then focus on communication, empathy and organizing ideas. More generally, try to understand product and the process around it. Take an idea, even one that's contrived and try to run through a SWOT (as lame as that sounds, the exercise makes you think). Don't get caught up trying to perfect your syntax - learn how to write (sometimes shitty) code to solve real problems.
Further, you'll rarely solve big problem on your own. Doing the above will prep you for working in a high functioning team. Strive to put yourself in a position to work with the best. From there life will take you to the right place.
We've been navigating on top of OSM for about 18 months now (Scout in the US, Scout/Skobbler in the EU/RoW) and it's pretty amazing how far it has come.
From a navigation standpoint the devil is in the details, like flow speeds and turn restrictions, which is where we see the majority of our issues (flow speeds significantly impact how you treat traffic and turn restrictions of course impact routing).
We developed this app rapidly over the last several weeks and would love some feedback from HN so we can iterate on the experience while working toward a cross platform experience.
The points that differentiate us depend on your specific application. We have robust routing/turn by turn nav, offline maps, data visualization (heat maps) plus a whole bunch of other common features (custom styling, for example).
Definitely check out our dev site, which admittedly lacks some polish but is coming along (http://developer.skobbler.com/) and let me know if you'd like to talk to one of our SDK guys - they always want to talk to devs about their specific use cases.
Telenav employee here - we've been navigating exclusively on OSM since June for both iOS and Android (Scout Maps App). We also acquired Skobbler earlier in the year, which navigates using OSM if you're outside the US.
I have a HUD in my car - it is great for navigation events and alerts. Turn arrows, street names and lane restrictions are all displayed when navigating. When not navigating it shows speed and alerts. Using the steering controls you can scroll through radio/media options. The image appears to be farther away than what is displayed in this product. That is a very important distinction. By appearing farther away you needn't refocus every time you glance slightly down to view the HUD data. This looks like a translucent screen right in front of the wheel. Not good.
"WI-FI" is a bit ambiguous for a comparison like this. If your intention was to compare land lines to cellular then it should be called out as such. It would also be important to note that the land line performance in areas with LTE coverage may be significantly better than the national average used.