Nuvi Phone

Garmin announced today it was getting into the phone business with the nuvifone, expected to be available in the second half of 2008. As you might expect it's part phone and part PND, but what you may not have expected is what seems to be the noticable prominence of Google powered search in the device (home screen photos to the left). As I had mentioned in previous posts, Google sees a huge next leg of growth in the world of connecting bits to atoms, rather than just bits to bits and not coincidentally is proving to be a far better source than either TeleAtlas or Navteq for the most up to date and accurate POIs.

In case you missed it, Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, had some incredibly bullish comments at Davos in recent days with regards to mobile location based advertising saying that "the arrival of a truly mobile Web, offering a new generation of location-based advertising, is set to unleash a "huge revolution"... and '"It's the recreation of the Internet, it's the recreation of the PC (personal computer) story and it is before us -- and it is very likely it will happen in the next year". Well in fact it looks like it will happen starting Q3 2008.

Ah... so that's why Google has been investing so heavily in Google Maps and Google Earth all this time... and I thought it was because they didn't want us to get lost anymore so we had more time to spend at home Googling stuff!

Google's self described mission is to organize the worlds information and make it useful. And a few years ago they probably looked out and foresaw the importance of mobility and mobile computing and found a dearth of quality "geo information" in which to throw the Google alghorithms at and to organize for us. So they took matters into their own hands and made the worlds most easy to use map solutions and opened it up for all to use, so when the time came and mobile search became a daily reality Google would have created a huge volume of location oriented information in need of a search and an organization solution.

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Back from CES, Need Gambling & Hi Tech Fix?

For all of you returning to your desks with a bad gambling and bleeding edge tech habit from a week in Vegas at CES 2008. I’d like to point out a couple of cool online games that could scratch that itch for both.

In, Spot the Bull, it seems that some crazy guy (or marketing team) went and attached a GPS tracking device along with some mini cams to a bull name Derek wandering about in his pen in a farm in the UK. The basic object of the game is to correctly guess (or bet) what part of the pen Derek will be in when the clock strikes 3p… friggin hilarious if you ask me and what the heck else are you going to do on a Friday afternoon after a week at CES?

If you like to work beer into your online LBS gaming, check out Heineken’s Delivery Men game. Possibly the same crazy marketing guy convinced Heineken that it would be a good idea to attach GPS tracking units to beer delivery trucks as they go about the business of delivering beer. The goal of the game is to correctly guess (or bet) where the truck will stop next. Cheers to the Locative Media blog for opening our eyes to that one.

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Catchy Name for Sale

There is an announcement today that uLocate has purchased the rights to the name Buddy Beacon from their client Helio… terms were not disclosed. uLocate had created the service for Helio and would now presumably use the Buddy Beacon name to turn around and market similar mobile friend finding applications under the same name using their WHERE platform. Without knowing the deal terms, some random off the cuff observations, none of which seem too positive for Helio…

MVNOs like Helio are almost certainly looking for ways to make any extra money they can these days, and given the meager amount of assets they own, is it possible that the most valuable thing they could dig up to sell, was the rights to a catchy name?

Typical MVNO don’t own much of anything, except their brand and the value adding marketing propositions they can create to acquire and hold on to customers. Buddy Beacon was seemingly one of those value adding services.

The MVNO business relies heavily on the ability to get customers to stick around long enough (and spend enough) to make back the cost that it took to acquire the customer in the first place and hopefully some extra. By selling off what seemed to be one of their more valuable assets Helio will now be just another provider with Buddy Beacon as a part of their service offering, effectively eliminating a reason to buy Helio specifically in the first place, and then also lowering a barrier to leaving for those Helio customers that did like the service.

A service such a Buddy Beacon will be so much more useful and likely to succeed if you could locate and interact with friends across any carrier, and uLocate will try to make that a reality I am sure. And for uLocate it seems smart to use all of that Helio marketing equity invested in the catchy Buddy Beacon name, to help give such a fledgling new service a running start.

In five years, I bet Buddy Beacon is alive and well… but I am not sure you could say the same thing for Helio.

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It’s a Kenwood, no it’s a Garmin

Garmin investors, are probably feeling a little bewildered today, after seeing GPS devices fly off the shelves as one of the hottest items this holiday season, the stock is down double digits this morning on a downgrade from Deutsche Bank. The downgrade can seemingly be summarized in one word: competition.

If you’re a Garmin investor and want to feel a little better, go back and check out this Cnet review of the Kenwood DNX7100… it’s a $1k+ all in one in vehicle unit… and per the reviewers commentary “the GPS is by far the best feature of this system.” The GPS part of the device of course is run by Garmin as a part of their Black Box alternative announced two CES’s a go.

GPS Business News is reporting that it is expecting an announcement soon regarding a more extensive relationship between Kenwood and Garmin that would also include Garmin navigation in future Kenwood systems.

If you’re a Garmin investor, seeing these types of deals develop has to make you feel a little better, knowing that at least some of the “competition” like Kenwood isn’t really competition after all, but a potential sales opportunity… and a shift from a box manufacturer business to an application and software development focus, at least as far as their consumer electronics segments are concerned is probably not a bad thing, particularly for that all important margin.

It all seems a bit reminiscent of Intel in a way, albeit Garmin is a combo of hardware and user interface… can little stickers with “Garmin Inside” be too far away?


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Cost Per LoV: More on LBS Advertising

There is an interesting interview with Peter Friedland an equity analyst with the Soleil Group on GPS Business News. He predicts that besides navigation, that mobile search and mobile social networking will be the next two big areas of growth in LBS with a particular emphasis on search via cell phone and “connected” PNDs. Now it’s not much of a stretch to see the existing search advertising leaders get into paid listings, with a new data point, location, available to them to help target ads. In other words, instead of searching on a web site for “sweater” and having a link to the EddieBauer.com website come up, you’d search for “sweater” on your phone and have the nearest Eddie Bauer retail store location pop up on your phone along with turn by turn directions to get there.

This alone will certainly open up new categories of local ad dollars from neighborhood pizza joint and nail salons that aren’t currently big AdSense advertisers. But what is even more interesting is that location awareness can get the big national advertisers one step closer to what every ad buyer ultimately wants, which is to completely close the loop on measuring how and if ad dollars are working to accomplish their desired goal of more sales.

Granted location awareness can’t tell you if a consumer that saw your ad bought the advertised product, but it can take a giant step in that direction by measuring whether someone who saw your ad actually went to the place you told them, like your retail store location. A big reason for the success of online media has always been its accountability and measurability, when compared to traditional media. So if there is a way to make this palatable to the consumer, you can be sure that it won’t be too long before we have another new media term to add to CPC (cost per click) and CPA (cost per acquisition) … look out for the cost per LoV, (Location Visit).


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Where r u?

There is an interesting piece on myLoki (Skyhook Wireless) and location information brokering by Brady Forrest on the O’Reilly Radar Blog, about how services are developing to give people more control over how, if and when they share their location with others. Just for fun, I went ahead and signed up for the myLoki account and added the location badge to the homepage of the blog… so if you ever need to know where I… err well where my computer is… chances are the map will give you a good idea of where to start looking… unless of course I stop piggy backing on my neighbors wi fi connection and connect through the corporate network, in which case you’ll likely think I am in Pennsylvania somewhere.

Besides Loki, the author cites a soon to be released developmental project, currently called Fire Eagle, out of the Yahoo idea incubator called Brickhouse as something to watch for in the area of location info brokering.

Details on the Fire Eagle project are scarce, well at least scarce to me, but the best details seem to be directly from Yahoo itself. In the most simple terms, the service allows you to share the location information your collect on yourself, either from a web service or mobile device, with other services and applications that you so choose.

In a way it acts as a clearing house to give control to users who want to share information about their whereabouts with others. It will allow a user to manage the level of location granularity different recipients will be able to see and manage different types of location information, including anything from GPS long/lat data, to Cell ID or manually entered postal code information.

You know how you have to always enter your zip code to do anything from looking at movie listings to seeing what the weather will be tomorrow? Well a system like Fire Eagle at the most basic level could roughly be like having a pervasive cookie that could be read by all sites which could contain your zip code information to share with each site that may request it, eliminating the annoying need for you to re enter that information manually each time you wanted location relevant information.

My guess is that this is the type of baby steps that a solution like Fire Eagle will initially be used for, but the potential is there to do much more powerful things, and could well be an important conduit of such information in the near future which could allow innovative LBS application developers to make a large leap forward.

The general concept of trying to act as this middle man is of course nothing new in these types of online exchanges. I am sure many will recall all the hype around the eWallets that were pervasive in the late 90s. Folks like Microsoft wanted to be your virtual wallet, streamlining and managing the process of giving personal and banking information to the various folks you may want to interact with on the web. In case you didn’t notice, eWallets aren’t pervasive now.

However I wouldn’t be so quick to assume the same fate for services like Fire Eagle for a couple of reasons. First I don’t see people being as paranoid about location as they are about their bank account information, especially given the proper tools for control. Second, the eWallet purely saved you a couple of steps of entering information into an online form manually, so it just saved you some headaches. Sharing location information, however can allow entirely new innovative services to be delivered…. know when friends are nearby, know when a sales is happening nearby, know where your loved ones are, search for anything in your immediate proximity, etc.

Once folks see the value that can be created through location awareness and sharing location awareness they’ll be more likely to gravitate to such a service because of the myriad of benefits they’ll expect to receive in return.

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