DASH API’s Part Two

For those not inclined to dig around for yourselves and see what the DASH APIs can do, here is the abbreviated version:

First the APIs currently available are for “Dynamic Search” which is a bit of a misnomer if you ask me. The “Dynamic” mostly just means that the results from the “search” are relevant to your location… so as your location changes so will the subsequent results from the “search” request. The “search” is not really a search as much as a filtering of the data from a single predefined database so as to only show data relevant to your location.

There is a widget type feature that allows a DashApp to be discovered and added directly to a Dash Navigation device directly from any website, rather than having to go through the MyDash service. Sure to be a popular viral marketing feature for app builders.

A limited number of HTML tags are also supported to allow application developers to control some of the look and feel of their data within the Dash device.
While all results are seemingly related to the users’ geographic location, results can be sorted by a variety of values not limited to distance, including by title, time/date, price and rating.

Elements of a response can include details such as title, description, time, phone, lat/long, street address, city, state, zip, distance from the user, price and rating.

It also seems that DASH is rightfully being quite judicious with the amount of data that it lets DashApps use, 5k per query it seems. At that rate I suppose they can allow users a fairly large amount of use, before they really start to eat into that pool of GPRS data.

The initial DashApps made available with the launch of the APIs include straightforward POI lookup services including real estate listing from Coldwell Banker and speed trap data from Trapster. Trapster includes the capability for device owners to report/submit new speed traps directly from their device. The weather service from WeatherBug and the BackTrax applications are less location sensitive but more dynamic. WeatherBug provides up to date weather condition and forecasts in your area, while BackTrax lets users look up the name of the last three songs played on all the radio stations in your area. The final inaugural application is called myFUNABOL calendar which allow you to import electronic calendars from places like outlook into the device.

This is undoubtedly a huge step in the right direction, and is a mere trickle of the types of location aware information I think we can expect to see turn into a tidal wave in the not too distant future. Despite the widely reported problems the Dash devices have in terms of size and poor basic GPS performance, it certainly makes me want to run out plop down my $399, at least until the Nuvifone hits shelves. I certainly hope Garmin has been watching DASH carefully and has been taking notes.

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DASH APIs – A closer look

I was excited to see the announcement a few weeks ago that DASH had opened up their Dash Navigation devices by providing developers with APIs to allow DASH users to receive 3rd party data on their device. The company claims their initiative is the ‘first GPS provider to open its service platform to third party developers”. You may be scratching your head having recalled API efforts from Garmin and TomTom announced over the past 3-4 years, specifically the Garmin Communicator Plugin and TomTom Navigator SDK were both designed for similar purposes in mind. Although I think the key difference here is the “3rd party developer” part. Since DASH devices are connected devices, what we’re really talking about here is the ability for a 3rd party to DYNAMICALLY pass their third party data over the Internet to Joe consumers’ device. With previous generations of PNDs not having the benefit of connectivity, previous APIs were more geared toward allowing the hard core geo geeks to add their own waypoints and tracks to THEIR OWN DEVICE (think Geocaching). Kudos to DASH for pushing the envelope here.

The APIs are currently relatively simple in what they can provide. Essentially if you’re the happy owner of location relevant data that you think would be valuable to a DASH users, you can now develop a little application that will allow DASH users to pull in the data relevant to their location through the DASH device if they think it’s worthy. A device owner must decide that one of the providers DashApps offerings looks interesting enough to add to their device through the MyDash portal. Once on the device the user proceeds to the search function on their device and navigates to the DashApp they added, where the location relevant information is presented to them. DASH announced their first five partners (follow link for demos) with the public introduction of the availability of the APIs including the ability to get location relevant listings on weather conditions, real estate home listings, speed traps. The speed trap application allows DASH users to not only receive a listing of location relevant speed traps, but to also report new traps directly through the device. Other applications include syncing your calendar, including the location of upcoming meetings to your DASH device as well as the ability to hear the last three songs played by radio stations in your vicinity.

Only limited functionality has been exposed so far, but the next phase is obviously on its way like the ability to change the distance radius included in search results, the number of items to return in each request, and probably most importantly potentially the ability to pull the data out of the purgatory of the search section of the device.

Overall it’s very encouraging to see this effort, and hopefully Garmin and TomTom take notice and get rolling on the next version of their own APIs.
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Nokia Sells a Whole Lotta Phones, Soon a Whole Lotta GPS

Well in case you weren’t already aware, Nokia is quite bullish on LBS these days. A new article out today has Nokia saying that half of the phones it sells will have navigation built in by the 2010 and 2012 timeframe. The company will sell nearly ½ billion phones in 2008 according to estimates and expects 35 million of those to come equipped with GPS (7% of current phone sales). “You will see few N or E series phones without GPS” according to Michael Halbherr, the head of LBS at Nokia. The N series sold 38 million phones and E Series sold 7 million phones last year. The company also expects all phones to have some level of coarse location awareness through either wi-fi or cell tower positioning schemes soon. As you might expect, Nokia seems to see the handset as the center of the LBS universe with storage and processing speed on the handset allowing the phone to provide much of the necessary capabilities for LBS directly rather than being heavily dependent on the phones wireless data connection to off load work to the network, which “overloads the network and degrades the consumer experience” according to Halbherr.

Hmm to throw a GPS chip in 250 million phones at $4 per chip would set them back $1 billion a year, looks like they could just buy the leading GPS manufacturer, SIRF, outright for less than half of that right now!
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More location awareness related advertising stuff...

More location awareness related advertising stuff... I put some slides up related to the location awareness opportunity for advertisers.

We're certainly not there yet, but some potentially interesting implication for where this could go in the future.

Summary is:
- GPS and location awareness in mobile devices is growing like a weed across a variety of devices - e911, 3G data, PNDs all contributing to bringing this to mass market
- location awareness anywhere and everywhere (ie not just where GPS works) is a key to consumer success
- all the big players are investing big NOW (Google, Nokia, Yahoo, Microsoft, Garmin, TomTom)
- web world was just warm up for mobile in terms of size and opportunity, and location awareness is key driver
- relevance (targeting) and time appropriateness is a key benefit and driver of the advertsing opportunity
- ad targeting is important key driver of revenue for existing web players (Google makes $12+ per average monthly unique, while MySpace makes $1.32)
- behavioral targeting, ROI metrics and search all get one step better with mobile location awareness
- privacy is a huge issue, but web cookies also once seen in a similar light



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Making Up Stuff About Yahoo Fire Eagle

Yahoo announced the arrival of its FireEagle location brokering product last Wednesday. What the heck is it you may ask? Well, straight from the source… according to Yahoo it “is the secure and stylish way to share your location with sites and services online. We want to make the whole web respond to where you are, and to help you discover more about the world around you.”

Ok. Well to start from the beginning. Yahoo wants to be the broker for your online location information. So what does that mean exactly? Well just like other types of brokers: stock broker, real estate broker, mortgage broker, and insurance brokers…. They want to help mediate the exchange between a buyer and seller of something of value. In this case, the thing of value is information related to where you are on this lovely planet.

So to be clear, there is currently no money directly exchanging hands and so far, the broker is doing his brokering for free.

So let’s think about why someone would want to buy and sell such a thing and why Yahoo would want to step into become the broker. So what do the buyer and seller in this brokerage relationship get out of it?

Buyers (websites, application developers) get relatively turnkey access to better information that makes their service more convenient and valuable. Nearly everyone who offers an online or mobile application would like to be able to easily know and use their customers’ location and integrate it into the features of the application. Granted it’s more important to some than others, but the need is widespread across a variety of applications for anything from letting you know the weather forecast or showing only relevant apartment listings, or showing pages in the correct local language. Heck if local governments takes a fancy to this, you might see them trying to collect different taxes based on where the user was when a transaction was consummated. Woo Hoo! Don’t worry, that ain’t happening anytime soon.

Sellers, (ie you the consumer), get the convenience of not having to explicitly tell every site or application you come across, your location information and you get to decide what to share or not share each time. Remember the eWallet phenomenon from the late ‘90s? The eWallet was going to save everyone the hassle of having to re enter their personal and financial information and the eWallet was the gatekeeper to your wallet online. In many ways Fire Eagle is a cross between the location equivalent of the eWallet and a cross site/device “smart cookie” that knows and holds your location information and just shares the detail that you want shared and only with “approved” sites.

Last but not least, assuming it’s not out of pure benevolence, what does Yahoo get out of this whole thing?

Well the answer is probably not that simple and straightforward, but I’ll hazard a point of view on where you could take this: Yahoo’s business is primarily selling advertising. And forget about amassing more and more page views as a strategy, the absolutely massive supply of potential impressions on the web means that only a very small fraction of those impressions ever get monetized. Instead, the name of the game is to have the high valued stuff that advertisers want.

So the next logical question is, well what kind of stuff do advertisers want? Well it can generally be broken into two parts…

1. Mass concentration of eyeballs in a single place. Think of the price premium advertisers place on an ad on a hot primetime program versus the equivalent number of eyeballs pieced together from running 100 spots at 3am

2. Targeting. The degree of match or correlation between the advertisers product and the reason the online impression was generated… ie there are billions of page views being generate out there on arcane scientific matters, oceanic current, Chinese consumer electronic company balance sheets, etc, etc that advertisers want absolutely nothing to do with

So here are some leading businesses who make their money from online advertising, and the stuff they provide that advertisers want:

• Google: just amazingly good at targeting/filtering, effective revenue per thousand is off the charts relative to anyone else. They could directly monetize the mass concentration aspect as well, but so far have chosen not to.

• Yahoo: both large aggregator of eyeballs for premium display ad business and also big player in search

• AOL: was once the largest aggregator of all Internet eyeballs, but is now forced to be an aggregator of large broad verticals of consumer friendly eyeballs (family, finance, entertainment type stuff). They also leverage their size by double-dipping and renting targeted search from Google.

So going back to Fire Eagle. By knowing people’s location information and matching that information with knowable information about the world around those people, the opportunity exists to target like never before. To date, targeting has been one dimensional from the point of view that it has been limited to indexing information from web pages and only reflects the view as seen from the time a user spends in front of a web browser.

If you look at how quickly mobile location awareness technology is proliferating into everyday consumer devices like cell phones, there is no reason to expect that everything that is currently done in the world of web based targeting won’t be stretched, linked and recreated into the ‘real world’ with mobile location aware devices at the foundation.

Let’s take a look at the way a few things work in the web world and see how they may translated into the mobile location awareness world:

Everything from PageRank to click through rates and behavioral targeting, could be recreated, through a widely available mass market location awareness program. So in theory this could be the foundation of what FireEagle is all about.

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Part 2: Maybe Soon Your TV Can Sit On It’s Butt and Watch You

After some more digging around on the web, I’ve now dug up enough new stuff to update the original post about Rosum’s new TV-GPS technology with some fresh tidbits.

So, first a quick review:
- Rosum is trying to develop a technology to supplement GPS and solve some of the major shortcomings of GPS… most notably the inability of GPS to be able to determine location indoors where it can’t see GPS satellites.
- Its solution: why not use something a little closer to home like broadcast television signals rather than those weak girly-man GPS signals from outer-space that have trouble even getting through the flimsy roof on your ’71 AMC Gremlin !


Now for the new updates. So it seems that they’ve rolled out coverage in the Northeast corridor from Washington DC to New Hampshire, well actually had it back in Fall of 2006… and given that the company has raised just $20 million to date, that must mean that the required network infrastructure build out must not be too much of a big, expensive an unwieldy process.



Rosum does talk extensively about how their solution uses existing technology on the broadcast tower. I can remember working with a company in the late 90’s called WavePhore that was trying to stuff various digital media down to web users over the unused portion of the broadcast signal called the vertical blanking interval (ie the portion reserved for the government to send emergency broadcast messages), so I just assume it works something like that.

Their solution does require regional monitoring units, but it seems that just a few, 3-4, are sufficient to cover each market, so maybe nothing like the thousands of boxes needed for alternative solutions. Overall the network deployment costs look like they may be favorable to alternatives like S5 Wireless.

It also looks like the actual location calculation is done on a server, off device. The Rosum equipped device will know only its pseudo location and need to check in with the regional monitoring unit to get a proper location fix. Which brings up the question of how does the device communicate with the location server to get a fix… well the answer right now is SMS. And it does seem that this poses an economical hurdle for use as a consumer solution… although I guess it depends on exactly how much SMS is necessary. And they’re working on a GPRS solution it seems. For folks like the military and first response teams, this SMS issue is of course a non issue.

It also looks like they’re pursuing a software only strategy that relies on mobile devices having tv tuner cards installed… but I am not sure I see that happening anytime soon despite what official research reports may say.

If you want to read more, fortunately their presentations seem to be all over the web, here are a few links:

http://www.e911institute.org/Events/2007/Rosum_CompanyOverview_WCAHomelandDefenseE9-1-1panel_18-January-2006_2.pdf
http://www.nlectc.org/training/commcorr2006/young_commcorr2006_indoor.pdf
http://www.ece.wpi.edu/Research/PPL/Workshops/2006/PDF/Rosum.pdf

Overall it looks pretty promising.

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Tid Bits from TeleAtlas 2007 Full Year Results

It’s all driven by the PND market for TeleAtlas right now…

Overall revenue increased 17%

• Six of the eight leading portable navigation device providers worldwide use Tele Atlas maps.

• PND growth 35% - 14.7 Million map units (bundled with PND sale).

• Map units in PND average selling price was just over 11 euro

• America’s PND revenue grew 136% year over year

• Wireless grew 66% on the backs of customer’s like Google, RIM, Mappy and Wayfinder

• Also helped by selection of Teleatlas to power Google Maps for mobile and Google Earth in Europe

• TomTom was largest customer representing 32% of revenue

• Automotive business saw declines in part due to loss of VW business, although picked up BMW business which should ship in 2008

• Expects 2008 revenue between 375 – 385 euro, versus 308 euro in 2007

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