GPS in 2008

It’s nearly that time of year for end of year wrap ups and to look ahead to 2008. Stephen Colwell at GPS World published a look ahead to 2008 for mass market GPS that’s worth a read. Some interesting takeaways:
- Nearly 10% of US households now own some sort of navigation device
- Personal Navigation Devices (PNDs) are likely to see even greater growth in 2008, brought on by new entrants and lower prices, although new entrants may need to dangle better deals in front of retailers to gain shelf space.
- Leading PND manufacturers will likely begin to focus on more specific market niches beyond the mass market… areas like aviation, fleet and enterprise solutions. Not that the potential for mass consumer PNDs seem tapped out or anything, but it’s never too early to start thinking about where future growth will come from… after all the existing 100-200% annual growth rates can’t be expected to be sustainable for much longer.
- Integration of LBS into Smartphones will be a major point of focus, as LBS continues to establish itself as a leading way to boost added arpu for carriers. The above mentioned three figure growth rates in PND sales has to be sending up some red flags to mobile carriers that there really is a hot market for handheld navigation solutions.
- Map makers, Tele Atla and Navteq will innovate like its 1999! Errr spend like drunken sailors to introduce crazy cool new functionality around their maps including 3d and aerial imagery… maybe?
- Price competition in GPS chipsets is expected to get serious as new suppliers get into that market and a new breed of very large buyers (such as smartphone makers and potentially camera makers, etc) will be putting in very large orders and could have significant negotiating leverage.

Prognostications aside, here is the stuff I HOPE makes some serious progress in 2008:

- Better mash-ups of location identifying technologies in a single solution. GPS is obviously the leader but by itself leaves a lot to be desired (ie just flat doesn’t work) in urban canyons or indoors. Need to mashup SIRF, Rosum and Skyhook all into one nice easy to implement package.
- Lower power consumption GPS chips. If you play with GPS and navigation much on a cell phone the first thing you may notice is how damn fast the battery drains. Anyone know how I can pick up shares in NemeriX?
- Connected PNDs. Hint: the P is supposed to stand for Personal. Right now it's personal as in personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut, not personal like Facebook or MySpace.
- LBS will no longer be synonymous with navigation. Let’s hope friend finders, locators/trackers, localized search, LBS gaming all make major inroads, so that navigation is no longer 93%+ of LBS revenues.
- NYC comes up with system to tell me how long I’ll have to wait on the subway platform before the next train arrives.
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Zoombak Open for Business

Liberty Media’s first foray into the consumer GPS device market opened its doors for business yesterday with a pre holiday soft launch of their A-GPS locator products. Zoombak products will be some of the smallest locator devices available while also having a technological edge over other similar GPS products thanks to their use of sister company, True Position’s A-GPS SUPL servers. Assisted GPS allows devices to use information from both terrestrial cell towers as well as GPS satellites to improve both reliability and accuracy of getting a location fix. The company is betting that the combination of superior technology along with a consumer friendly low upfront price and unlimited use service plan will create a unique combination that will allow it to quickly become a category leader.

Device’s are currently only available for sale through the website at http://www.zoombak.com/ but are expected to be available via several major national retail chains in early 2008.
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TomTom and Google Maps: Send to GPS

Well it seems that the connected PND is getting closer and closer to reality. TomTom announced that they're working with Google to allow users to send locations to their portable navigation devices through the "send to GPS" feature within Google Maps. Try the video above, it pretty much explains it all. I am sure that no one at TomTom would admit it but they seem to be conceding that so far Google has developed the best method for getting accurate and updated POI data via their multi pronged approach (purchased data + Google Local Business Center + html page scraping patent). If consumers take advantage of this on a regular basis I wonder if TeleAtlas could also be keeping a copy of these POIs for themselves as a tool to help plug holes and fine tune in its own TeleAtlas POI database? If so, TomTom should promote the heck out of this service, with funding from the TeleAtlas product development budget!

On a related note, I am still not sure why this type of process still requires use of the tethered TomTom Home connection. Wouldn't it be better if folks could pass this information around over the air? Say you're trying to find a place to meet up with someone navigating around with a TomTom device, it would be great to pick a place to meet on a Google map and just send to your friends device directly via a wireless connection. I can certainly understand PND manufacturers not wanting to get into the MVNO businesses, but this is the logical next step and with the bluetooth connection already present in so many of these devices, all the parts are already in place. Anyone with any clue as to why this is not yet happening? Whats the hold up to sending map or POI data to PNDs over the air?

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