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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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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Why SIRF Can Still Succeed in a Rapidly Commoditizing Business

Folks who follow the ups and downs of SIRF’s stock price in the hopes that it goes up more than down, have likely heard many time more than they care to admit how SIRF is a one trick pony in the rapidly commoditizing and increasingly competitive business of producing GPS chipsets.

I recall similar arguments about both Garmin and Navteq for a quite a while, about all the competitors that plan to enter Garmin’s PND market or how super high resolution photography would tank Navteq’s old fashioned map making business. Meanwhile shares of both companies have continued to see tremendous success despite these challenges which indeed have materialized, yet been slow to hamper either Garmin or Navteq’s growth. They succeeded because 1. The did one thing, and only one thing and did it well and 2. the overall market was growing so fast that any bumps created by competitors were smoothed over by the torrid overall growth.

Those arguments of the intense competition in PNDs is what led me to follow SIRF in the first place… logic being: heck if I know who will win the PND race, but they’ll all need top of the line GPS chips to have a go at it.

Keeping their technology at a premium price seems like the right approach for SIRF in the face of oncoming competition. What's the alternative? Drop price on even the latest and greatest models to keep market share up?

It’s much easier to lower prices than to try to raise them again later with pretty much anything, so going low doesn't make sense to me. SIRF still have basic chipsets to sell to low end folks who just want to have a line item in marketing that's says "w/ GPS inside" so they're not walking away from that market. Instead they're trying to keep their de facto standard for more leading edge and expensive devices that require 1. higher performance and 2. ease of integrating GPS with other things they want to do with the device, which for many manufacturers is a huge costs savings over multi sourcing components and testing to be sure they play together nicely on the device.

Here are five reasons why I think SIRF still has many bright days ahead of it:

1. Huge Category Growth Ahead
What’s that saying, a rising tide lifts all boats? LBS is a nascent market, with in dash navigation not even hitting mid single digits in North America let alone any other mass adoption of location awareness services. PNDs (personal navigation devices) are growing 100%+ a year with similar growth outlook ahead for the immediate future, and GPS chips seemingly going into everything these days, from portable gaming systems to package tracking and vehicles of all sorts.

2. Market Leadership Position
For folks who live and die by performance and features like PNDs, and OEM solutions (75-80% of SIRFs current biz), I just don’t see them trying to save $3-4 dollar on the GPS chip and risk poor performance for such an important component, particularly since most of these devices will retail in the hundreds of dollars. I think they’ll tend to stay with the recognized market leader. Reminds me of the early days of Internet ad buying, no one ever got fired for buying Yahoo, but if you recommended 100Hot.com, it was a heck of lot more work and well you were taking your chances. Same with recommending IBM computers in the 1980s.

3. Handset Market Will Be A Big Growth Driver
Only 20% of SIRF’s current biz is cell phones, and GPS in handsets is becoming more a necessity rather that a luxury. For one, U.S. based GSM carriers selected device based solutions for adhering to government e911 requirements, which for now means required GPS chipsets. Typical handset churn is something like 18 months so all new replacements phones will need GPS. Europe and other countries are also looking at mandatory e911 requirements. Also carriers and MVNOs are looking for ways to raise ARPU through data services and will increasing want LBS as a way to accomplish this. The U.S. is way behind in adoption of LBS applications, and if they ramp as has been seen in Japan and Western Europe then there is huge potential growth there in terms of revenue, and you need GPS chipsets in phones in order to earn this money.

4. Software based alternatives will likely supplement GPS rather than replace
Software based positioning solution are all over the place… if it propagates a signal in any mass way, someone has tried to triangulate off it. But at the moment many are commercially un-viable. One big structural problem with many software based mobile solutions is that they often require 'talking' to the network to get data points to triangulate from, talking to the network means paying big money to a mobile carrier or satellite service provider which makes them economically unattractive to many. In reality for the foreseeable future it’s likely these technologies would just be used as compliment or backup to traditional GPS rather than an outright replacement. And guys like SIRF should in theory be first to know of anything that's making traction, since enabling location awareness is their sole business. I'd expect that they'd more quickly adopt alternative location awareness technologies into a single solution more quickly than someone not 100% focused on the sector.

5. Major online players embracing location and mapping in a big way
Digital search guys are looking at location awareness quite aggressively. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask are all investing and developing significantly in mapping space. It's just a matter of time before people will want to see more real time stuff around those maps… and local advertising is new fertile ground for expansion for folks like Google who will need to aggressively identify new growth areas in the form of local and mobile search.

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Garmin Mobile XT: Plug 'N Play Maps for Your Phone

Garmin International Inc., a unit of Garmin Ltd. today announced Garmin Mobile XT, a unique, all-in-one software solution that turns select smartphones with internal GPS into high-end Garmin navigators. This mobile phone software application seamlessly pairs the phone's built-in GPS with Garmin's software so that customers have the benefits of navigation anywhere in North America or Europe. Unlike other mobile phone applications, Garmin Mobile XT offers convenient preloaded maps and includes access to dynamic content like premium real-time traffic alerts and fuel prices, but does not require any monthly fees or subscriptions of any kind.

"Garmin Mobile XT is easy-to-use and affordable, with no monthly charges," said Charles Morse, Garmin's director of mobile and PND marketing. "It's a one-time investment that gives customers full-featured GPS navigation on their smartphone whenever and wherever they need it, including areas outside of wireless network coverage."

Garmin Mobile XT is preloaded on a microSD card (with miniSD and standard SD card converter) that includes Garmin navigation software for the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico, or Europe. Once the card is inserted into a compatible smartphone with embedded GPS, the Garmin Mobile XT application will launch automatically. Customers are then greeted with Garmin's intuitive "Where to?" and "View map" welcome screen. With a few screen or button taps, customers can easily route to a specific street address or choose from millions of points of interest -- such as restaurants, hotels, ATMs, and gas stations. In addition to turn-by-turn, voice prompted directions, users will also see their exact position on a detailed moving map. If a turn is missed along the way, a new route will be recalculated automatically.

Thanks to Garmin's vast product line and ability to leverage technology from the other GPS markets Garmin serves, Garmin Mobile XT builds in unique features such as support for travel guides, topo maps and custom points of interest, as well as advanced features such as route planning with saved routes, custom avoidances and visible trip logs. Garmin Mobile XT users also have the benefit of routing to the location of a contact in their phone's address book or to a calendar appointment (on supported platforms).

Garmin Mobile XT also includes PeerPoints(TM), a powerful feature enabling users to send their position to any other phone as well as view and navigate to the location of other Garmin Mobile XT users. PeerPoints is the perfect way to keep track of friends and family and navigate to them with the touch of a button.

In addition to navigation, Garmin Mobile XT includes free access to Garmin Online(TM) so that customers have useful, constantly-updating information at their fingertips like real-time traffic, fuel prices, hotel prices and weather forecasts. The real-time traffic service from traffic.com identifies accidents, road construction or other incidents affecting traffic, and routes users around the congestion. The fuel price feature displays the filling station's name, fuel price, type of fuel, and distance to the station (U.S. only). Garmin Mobile XT users can also help customers find hotel information, ratings and discounts from hotels.com. Real-time weather information provided by Custom Weather lets users see weather forecasts at their current location or anywhere in the world. Garmin Online is accessed through the phone's wireless data service.

Garmin Mobile XT is available now for a suggested retail price of $99 in the U.S. Garmin Mobile XT products purchased in the U.S. include maps of all North America. In Europe, Garmin Mobile XT includes map data for 30 countries in Europe. Map data is provided by NAVTEQ(TM) -- a world leader in premium-quality mapping.

Visit the Garmin Mobile Buyer's Guide, http://www.garmin.com/mobile, for more information or to purchase Garmin Mobile XT.

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Garmin Connect: Location Awareness + Community

Garmin announced today a makeover for their online community for fitness devices formerly known as Motion Based. This makeover, renamed Garmin Connect itself is not particularly of interest but some of the underlying implications and insights from the program are. And maybe it’s just me but the move from a fitness friendly moniker like Motion Based to a more general name, Garmin Connect, signals to me that there are likely more of such initiatives on their way for other Garmin Products.

The service is an online community designed to allow users of Garmin's fitness products to store and share information related to their fitness routine using Garmin products. In addition to being a personal fitness portal, it appears that some of the information will be taken in aggregate in order to add value to the entire community at large, so visitors can see popular jogging paths and general stats of runners or to compete in virtual races. It should be noted that similar offerings are available through Bones in Motion via BIM Active for use with your cell phone.

The combination of location awareness and community continues to build and these added value features are likely to be an effective way for Garmin to put up a barrier to its customers adopting another GPS fitness devices, while also laying a foundation for building a higher margin component to its low cost and low margin product lines.

Garmin had previously announced the USB ANT Stick to support the Forerunner 50. The stick plugs into your PC to automatically retrieve data from the Forerunner whenever it is within range.

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Nokia 500 PND

Well it looks like Nokia announced today the arrival of its next generation of PND, due out in Europe in 4Q and the U.S. by end of year or early 2008. Reviews for the first try (the 330) weren't all that great... cnet review categorized it as 'not horrible, per se'. Not exactly a ringing endorsement. On paper the new 500 seems to have a lot of the high end features that one would presumably want when buying a system... like built in bluetooth for using the device as a hands free system and an fm transmitter for easily tapping into the vehicles existing stereo system. The 500 also speaks road names and ties the POI contact information to the communications systems to make it easy to call ahead to a POI with a touch of a button. Although none of this is the first time we've seen these capabilities in a PND, it's all catch up to Garmin as far as I can tell. I thought the feature that allows you to upload the addresses of your contacts from your phone to your PND so you can navigate to them was a nice touch, although one that I doubt will get much use.

Price is set at 300 euro, which seems to undercut similar Garmin offerings by about 1/3, but the devil is likely to be in the details. Folks have been screaming that the sky is falling for pure play gps manufacturers like TomTom and Garmin for quite a while... ie prices will begin to collapse and massive competition is on its way. And this Nokia offering certainly seems to be a case in point. However, for customer that are willing to shell out many hundreds of dollars for a PND, I'd question how sensitive they will be to that extra hundred dollars or two when faced with the alternative between "not horrible" and state of the art.

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In light of TomTom's recent acquisition of TeleAtlas, the obvious question on everyone's mind is... what about NavTeq. There is a good post over on Seeking Alpha with some speculation on what may be in store for them and the potential winners and losers.
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