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.
Continue...

Nokia Sells a Whole Lotta Phones, Soon a Whole Lotta GPS

Well in case you weren’t already aware, Nokia is quite bullish on LBS these days. A new article out today has Nokia saying that half of the phones it sells will have navigation built in by the 2010 and 2012 timeframe. The company will sell nearly ½ billion phones in 2008 according to estimates and expects 35 million of those to come equipped with GPS (7% of current phone sales). “You will see few N or E series phones without GPS” according to Michael Halbherr, the head of LBS at Nokia. The N series sold 38 million phones and E Series sold 7 million phones last year. The company also expects all phones to have some level of coarse location awareness through either wi-fi or cell tower positioning schemes soon. As you might expect, Nokia seems to see the handset as the center of the LBS universe with storage and processing speed on the handset allowing the phone to provide much of the necessary capabilities for LBS directly rather than being heavily dependent on the phones wireless data connection to off load work to the network, which “overloads the network and degrades the consumer experience” according to Halbherr.

Hmm to throw a GPS chip in 250 million phones at $4 per chip would set them back $1 billion a year, looks like they could just buy the leading GPS manufacturer, SIRF, outright for less than half of that right now!
Continue...

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.

Continue...

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).


Continue...

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.

Continue...

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.
Continue...

Really just looking for an excuse to post infomercial video

Ok I admit, I am mostly just trying to spice up the blog a bit with a funny infomercial video for a LBS start up called Dopplr. So check it out…



Dopplr is still in private beta so chances are you haven’t played with it yet, so in case you’re curious and can’t figure out from the video what the heck it does, here is how best I can explain it… its kind of a mash up of MeetUp meets LinkedIn meets Socialight for the road warrior crowd. In other words you can plan to meet up with people you may know who may be in the same areas as you as you travel around the country, using a handy dandy web and map interface. You can also use Dopplr to document past trips and to share your plans for future trips, so anyone in your group can see that you’re heading to Los Angeles next week and make suggestions on good places to stay or eat during your stay.

Seems like an interesting idea, although I am not sure how big the audience is of folks who regularly jet-set all around, and would spend the time to check in on Dopplr for each trip. I am also not sure how you’d make money if you’re Dopplr, but it’s a pretty funny video to enjoy while we wait to see how it all works out.

Continue...

Notes on an Apple LBS patent

I noticed a new patent filing picked up on the Directions Magazine blog noting a new LBS patent from Apple that looked interesting. Seems that Apple will plan to have GPS chips in those next generation of Ipods and Iphones, not just for navigation but to give you a new way to blend location into your media experience. The patent seems to essentially cover the process of linking location to media presentment. One way it seem that this patent could be applied would be to present different songs or playlists at a given point in time… let’s say you’re an avid runner and like to bring your iPod with you on runs… you probably already have a run mix just so you don’t have to fiddle with picking songs while you’re running… well blending location awareness could do the playlist one better by giving you the songs you want at the place you want it… say super high energy songs for those long hills and more mellow wind down music for the after run cool down. The location based controls could also control volume to know if you typically need more volume say next to a busy highway or less volume in a more secluded area like a library. Similarly, video brightness and contrast could vary for indoor or outdoor environments.

The patent is interesting enough, but what would be a more interesting application of location tied to iPod and iTunes would be to create location based zones that sellers of audio or video media could use to highlight offerings relative to ones location. For example, let’s say that Madonna wanted to give each person attending her concert on opening night a free download of her new single, attendees at the concert who bring their iPods should be able to navigate to a section within their iPod to see and download such location relevant offers. Same goes for community bands, and garage bands everywhere, rather than the wasted expense of burning CDs and convincing local stores to carry their music… those bands could simply set up geo boundaries around their concert events so concert goers with iPods could buy albums right there on the spot through their iTunes account, while the iron is hot and the concert goer is caught up in the passion that real time events can create.

Continue...

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.

Continue...

You can steal my car but you can't run fast and far...

This may be old news to some. Anyway, last week GM subsidiary OnStar announced that it has demonstrated a LBS technology that can slow down a stolen vehicle by limiting the fuel flow to the engine. According to the Onstar website, here's how it works:

• Once the vehicle has been reported stolen to law enforcement, the subscriber calls OnStar to request Stolen Vehicle Location Assistance.
• OnStar uses real-time GPS technology to pinpoint the exact location of the stolen vehicle and provides this information to law enforcement to help them recover the vehicle.
• When law enforcement has established a clear line of sight of the stolen vehicle, they may request OnStar to slow it down remotely.
• Safeguards will be in place to ensure that the correct vehicle is slowed down.
• OnStar then sends a remote signal to the vehicle that interacts with the Powertrain system to limit fuel flow to the engine which slows the vehicle down gradually.

Is GM car safer now with this new Onstar feature? Or, should I be concern that a glitch in the system may slow down my car by mistake?
Continue...

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?

Continue...

"It's not a Mona Lisa painting. It's a car."

NY cab drivers filed a court case recently about being forced to have GPS locators/monitors in their vehicles - they lost the battle yesterday. It may improve the situation for drivers, especially if the locators/monitors have navigation, traffic, and other LBS services associated with them. Don't be surprised, however, if prices for cab rides go up as a direct result...or if there is a strike and you can't find one on Monday morning.

I like the idea of credit cards for cab rides though - we are rarely a cash-based society anymore.

"A federal judge on Friday refused to block a new city rule that requires taxi drivers to install global positioning systems and credit card machines in their cabs by Monday.

The drivers argue that the city overstepped its authority and acted unconstitutionally when it mandated the units. Their lawsuit also claims GPS will give away trade secrets by disclosing the cabbies' driving patterns, which they say give them a competitive edge.

U.S. District Judge Richard M. Berman refused to immediately block the rule from taking effect, saying Friday that the use of the technology to improve taxi service appeared to outweigh drivers' privacy rights in this case. He urged the two sides to negotiate and set the next hearing for Oct. 10.

Malcolm Goldstein, a lawyer for the taxi drivers, said he was reading the judge's ruling and had no immediate comment.

Berman said that on the limited amount of evidence he had viewed so far, it did not appear the drivers would succeed in claims that the city acted improperly, caused them "severe and debilitating economic harm" and prevented them from earning their livelihood.

At an earlier hearing on Wednesday, Berman had expressed skepticism toward the drivers' arguments, saying, "It's not a Mona Lisa painting. It's a car."

After that hearing, dejected driver Beres Ford Simmons said: 'Gentlemen, prepare for another strike.'

Hundreds of drivers idled their cabs for a two-day protest of the GPS technology in early September. More than 13,000 yellow cabs must be equipped with GPS and software that record where the cars are every eight seconds or the drivers could face fines. The group leading that strike called it a "resounding success," while city officials said disruption was minimal."

What about the urban canyon effect for GPS? Will it really be able to pinpoint where they are every 8 seconds?

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070928/ap_on_re_us/taxi_technology

Continue...

Maps and more: Nokia revamps its location-based experiences

A better UI for more devices and more coverage illuminate Nokia's navigation plans

Helsinki, Finland - Speaking at the Canalys Navigation forum in Barcelona, Michael Halbherr shared insights about the current state of navigation and plans for updates and improvements for Nokia Maps. Launched in February of this year, the Nokia Maps mobile application and the Nokia Map Loader for PC's have each been downloaded over 1 million times.

A key point highlighted by Halbherr, head of the location-based experience team in Nokia Multimedia was the evolution of Nokia Maps from the first version, announced in February, to the next phase, which is available for download today. "We have taken a lot of the consumer feedback that we received when we launched Nokia Maps and are feeding that into the next versions of the product," said Mr. Halbherr.

The updated Nokia Maps application has a new streamlined user interface with improved nearby search and detailed categories. "Many people were saying that they didn't know how much data they were using, so we have added a data download counter in the map view. We also added a GPS status indicator so that you know when your device is connected to the satellites." The updated version also comes with a bonus three-day trial Navigation license free of charge*. "With this trial users can try out the service over a weekend holiday or a short business trip and discover the convenience of having a personal navigation device integrated into their mobile."

"Speaking of streamlining things," added Halbherr, "We are happy to report that we have a new and improved PC Map Loader available for users to download." The Nokia Map Loader is used to conveniently side load maps on to the device before you need them. "The improved Map Loader transfers the maps up to 10 times faster than the first version and enables downloading the voice guidance files."

Both new versions of Nokia Maps and the Nokia Map Loader are freely available to download* for selected devices at http://maps.nokia.com/

Nokia is also updating the map coverage during the second half of 2007 to bring the total number of countries covered to over 150, with more than 50 of them navigable. "Our goal is to have the world covered," exclaimed Mr. Halbherr, "We want our navigation customers to feel assured that when they travel abroad, their Nokia device has the relevant maps for them. A map is like an insurance policy against getting lost, you need it most when you are lost, and when that happens, it is invaluable."

Nokia Maps is being integrated into Ovi. Ovi is the door to Nokia's Internet services, including the Nokia Music Store, Nokia Maps and N-Gage games. It will also be an open door to web communities, enabling people to access their content, communities and contacts from a single place, either directly from a compatible Nokia device or from a PC.

Continue...

Kajeet and GeoSentric Raise Funds

A couple of LBS players announced that they recently completed fund raising rounds.

Kajeet an MVNO targeting kids and tweens and their parents closed $36.8 Million in a second round of funding. Kajeet offers pay as you go voice service combined with a dashboard for parental controls and location awareness capabilities. The company is hoping to navigate the treacherous MVNO waters that have recently sunk hi fliers including AMP’d and

A more pure play LBS start up, GeoSentric, announced that they have raised $13 million to expand sales and marketing as well as R&D behind their GyPSii product, and efforts to create a leading geo integration platform for mobile phones, PNDs, web browsers and other internet connected devices.

Continue...

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.

Continue...

Are all E911 calls created equal?

There's been something that's been bothering me for several years now and it continues to blow my mind to this day: why are there a different set of E911 accuracy requirements between GSM and CDMA carriers? Since the ability for our public safety systems to pinpoint our location is equally critical for all, why aren't all wireless carriers held to the same standard in enabling this service?

For all of you about to point out, I certainly realize that the CDMA carriers' GPS-focused approach towards E911 Phase II compliance puts them in a better position to deliver higher accuracy. But GSM carriers certainly had the same opportunity to pursue GPS at the time of the mandate and decided instead to pursue a network-based approach (first E-OTD, then U-TDOA) instead - they prioritized breadth of handset coverage over accuracy, since the network-based technologies did not require new handsets to be deployed. So I ask - shouldn't the accuracy requirements have been regardless of which technology path a carrier decided to take??

The FCC appears to be wising up to this argument slightly, with their recent posturing to address the performance gaps in more challenging environments, such as indoors - where nearly 50% of all E911 calls are actually made. The FCC is starting to hint at pushing for a common set of accuracy requirements across carriers and technologies and we'll see how far this topic is pushed at the upcoming open meeting on September 11.

Continue...

Atoms + Bits: How Location Awareness Will Change Search Advertising

Searching for things, not information about things.

Not that long ago there were just a few television stations or newspapers that everyone watched and read and advertisers would reach huge masses of people without regards to their suitability or interest. This shotgun, mass media for the masses, led to massive waste. As Wannamaker’s famous quip puts it “I know half my advertising budget is wasted. The trouble is I don’t know which half.”


As media became more fragmented, appealing to niche interests and demographics, advertising fragmented along with it, continually gravitating toward content with the best contextual match for their brands and products.

Search engines moved this whole evolution into high gear by providing the ability to target ads in maximum context, not only to a vertical category of interest, but down to the level of a single search query, with an audience of one.

While better context alone has been a huge improvement for advertisers, the search engines’ combination of maximum context with the predisposition of users actively in search mode has proven to be the killer combination that is revolutionize advertising.

This high level of context combined with high engagement has allowed search companies to price on performance, which has been the linchpin of their success. This has proven to be such an incredibly lucrative combination that Google alone is now worth more than the leading old media companies of Disney, Time Warner and Viacom combined.

The most important contributors to the search success: 1. Maximum Context and 2. Right Timing

Location Awareness is The Next Step: Atoms + Bits

For all their successes, web search engines are currently still largely confined to the world of data on web-servers, connecting atoms to bits (you to information), not atoms to atoms (you to other people and stuff), at least not directly. Discovering a profile or description in a database can sometimes be the end goal, but very often the true end goal, particularly in mobile environments is to connect to some THING that exists in the real world, not information about that thing. Either to buy it, experience it, or hook up with it.

Location awareness will add a new and very significant dimension to the search business. As access to the Internet becomes ubiquitous, the location and circumstance under which a search is conducted could dramatically change the results sought. In the real world, people move around, as do the things that they may be interested in searching for. Items in one location will have a different context than if they were in another location and physical proximity will play an important role in determine if the timing is indeed right.

Mobile search users aren’t likely to be researching book reports… so understanding that the needs in the mobile circumstance may be different will be key. Search needs to develop to the point where searching for ‘bathroom’, ‘bus’ or ‘coffee’ on a mobile device can mean finding the nearest one of those THINGS in the world around you.

Take for example the man standing in the rain at bus stop in New York City. Opening up his mobile browser and searching for the term ‘bus’ today will get him the Greyhound corporate website, the city bus service in Hawaii, the Los Angeles county MTA, and two Wikipedia entries as the top five listings. Even if it did return a NYC transit based website, all you’re likely to get there is corporate information and timetables. Certainly this would be better than nothing, but still far short of what he really wants to know which is where is his bus!

Major developments needed to take place in order to take this next step in search services, specifically gaining situational knowledge and awareness, or the context in which the search is being done. Much of this context can be inferred from specific location cues, is the user at a bus stop, or in a baseball stadium or away from familiar territory?

Someone will also need to better attach bits to atoms and know the location of those atoms. Portable mini data storage that can communicate information about itself and its location out to the web will need to come into more widespread use to give web server like information that can be attached or associated with real life stuff, and its whereabouts factored into the search equation.

As the volume and usefulness of the underlying data expands, so too will the number of search queries… and we all know what that will mean for the bottom line of the search engine that enable it.

Continue...

Holding out hope for LBS on my first-gen iPhone...

These days I find myself missing my GPS-enabled services from Verizon Wireless. Back in late June, I played into the hype, throwing my Samsung u740 to the side for the iPhone. I loved having this location-aware device always sitting right by my side, helping me find my nearest Starbucks or getting me back on track when lost in a new city. Now with AT&T, I am treated to hundred-page bills and the need to know where I am when I want to find things around me, given the widely-publicized omission of GPS from the gadget of the century.

However I still hold out a glimmer of hope that LBS will come to my first generation iPhone - with companies like Skyhook Wireless taking an alternative approach to offering location-based services through Wi-Fi. Skyhook has gone to great strides to map out the location of public and private Wi-Fi networks across the United States and enables websites to offer location-aware services through its technology and database. Back in May, Skyhook announced support of its technology in Mac OS X. Since the iPhone runs a version of Mac OS X and contains built-in Wi-FI, could we see Skyhook-powered Wi-Fi location-based services running on the iPhone in the future?? I hope so...
Continue...

Global Trek Xploration Corporation develops "GPS Footwear” to track loved ones.

These GTX GPS Xplorer Smart Shoes will let you keep track of your children, novice marathoners or your scavenger hunt team, wherever they roam.

The Xplorer Smart Shoe allows you locate the wearer of the shoes. Like many GPS locator devices, you are able to define a "safe" zone that sends an alert when the boundary line is crossed. For example, you can create a safe zone around a school or neighborhood where you feel safe for your children. When the child wanders outside of the safe zone, an SMS alert will be sent to your phone. This finder device allows for piece of mind while minimizing the risk of the device being lost. These shoes can stay charged for several days for an extended feeling of security.

For more info, go to: http://www.gtxcorp.com/

Continue...

Dual Source GPS Chipsets

Looks like folks are increasingly dual sourcing GPS chipsets these days, which can only mean bad things for the crazy 90% market share that SIRF currently enjoys. SIRF took one on the chin yesterday as STMicroelectronics announced that they were ramping up their own production for a deal with Garmin (ST also provides fab services for fabless SIRF by the way). Looks like that may have had something to do with ST’s readiness for Galileo in Europe and maybe something to do with superior Time To First Fix? SIRF seems to be busy away at trying to integrate more and more features on a single chipset, like navigation, entertainment, etc to fight off competitors and commoditization. Think the rationale goes something like this… “sure we can sell you a plain vanilla GPS chip, but we know you’re going to want to add navigation and other features to the device anyway, so why not buy this all in one fancy system on a chip for just three dollars more and it will save you a ton of hassles and get you to market more quickly.”
Continue...