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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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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Is the Map All That? Google, NAVTEQ and Imaging America

There was an interesting blog posting on Directions Magazine that is essentially a comment by a Google exec saying that they weren’t interested in bidding for Navteq because they felt that if they wanted to get into the digital map making business they could do so much more economically by opening up map making to the masses and develop a wiki map program to build maps through their Google Earth Platform. There is an interesting article over on O’Reilly Radar about how Google already used ‘crowdsourcing’ to develop maps in India.

Google currently sources data for their maps from a large variety of sources, but I don’t think it should come as too much of a surprise to see Google make their own maps in the very near future if they so wish. With the all the street level initiatives under way as well as the recent acquisition of Imaging America many of the pieces are there for Google to begin building build their own navigation maps from data they already own or can now more easily acquire. For simple road navigation the existing maps are likely more than adequate and my guess is that NavTeq and TeleAtlas have priced the maps low enough for online players like Google that there is not a financial motivation for developing their own. Only 5% of Navteq revenue comes from Internet and Wireless, which must means many orders of magnitude smaller revenue on a per-map render or user basis that in the auto segment… my guess is that this is in part a defensive maneuver, to keep folks like Google from turning from a customer into a competitor.

One short year ago, Navteq shares were getting beaten up in part because of concern by Wall Street types that technology such as the very high resolution photos that Imaging America’s equipment makes possible, would soon mean that detailed maps could be created by a variety of new market players. Buyers of the images would simply need to use the images to build their own maps using a few folks in a back office somewhere using some CAD software rather than via the more expensive and time consuming process of driving the nations’ roadways. That threat still exists, particularly for consumer navigation quality maps, but I don’t think that is as interesting to Google as the acquisition of previously unmapped items ranging from fire-hydrants to pine trees and street signs which will continue to feed the need for more and more data that is Google’s lifeblood.


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Digital Location Management Inc.

I was looking through the Google Maps terms of service and legal notices yesterday to see if we could use Google Maps for a project and uncovered a few things of potential interest.

First, the geo encoding is performed by Navteq in case anyone was wondering.

Second, besides the usual suspects of Navteq and TeleAtlas, I was surprised at the number of other map related resources that are working together behind the scenes to power Google Maps… many not so well known names such as Euro Geographics, Top Map and GeoNext.

Third, also interesting to note that the foundation of business POI data seems to be from infoUSA and Acxiom… but Google of course adds to this through both business listings submitted via the Google Local Business Center and its patent on scraping address data from web pages.

I guess with all these different sources, I shouldn’t find it surprising that I can often more reliably find a local retail businesses location through a search on Google Maps than through the retailers own web store locator.

For anyone looking for a new business to start, I can see this area of Digital Location Management developing into a full blown cottage industry, as we’ve seen with search engine optimization (SEO).

As the digital world turns more and more to finding things via maps, whether on the web, a PND or mobile phone, the reliable representation of retailers on those digital maps will become increasingly important and a consultancy/management market will need to be created to help anyone with a retail presence in the bricks and mortar world to ensure that their locations are properly reflected in all the various digital map data sources for such information, and to ensure that retail location information is accurate and updated.

What do you think?

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Ubiquitous search may be just around the corner

According to Business Standard, Google is in discussions with Bharti Airtel (an Indian mobile operator) and Vodafone to debut a Google brand mobile device in early September ‘07 called the gPhone. Google plans to invest about $8 billion on the device and has been negotiating with T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless to support it. Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman and CEO, said that they may participate in the FCC's upcoming 700 MHz spectrum auction.

The yet to be announced Google Phone may be designed by Samsung, and could include a large screen, QWERTY keyboard, a 2 megapixel camera, 3G, WiFi and other Google services like Search, Gmail, Maps, Blogger.

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