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.