By: Marc Prioleau (Marketing Guy)
Created: 1/8/08

We're at CES and have a meeting room in the North Hall...home of the automotive audio folks. That means we get wall-to-wall, non-stop pulsating bass coming from cars packed with woofers, sub-woofers and other bone-shaking stuff.  There's a lot of interest in navigation as I guess you'd expect given the retail success of navigation last quarter. 

What's news?  Lots of new products in different shapes and sizes but most just seem to be filling out the portfolio.  Every major PNAV provider has recently made some announcement of a Connected Navigation  offering.  Most aren't shipping today but you have:

1. Garmin taking MSN Direct a step further with some waypoint and destination download capability.  This is a broadcast technology which limits the ability to query.
2. Mio with an plan for links to local search and downloadable POI's. 
3. Magellan announces a GPRS connected CNAV device that ties in to Google for search and sending addresses tio the POI

and a few others.  Connected Navigation is becoming a buzzword but its definition depends on wh is speaking.  It can be anything from RDS traffic broadcast on FM to full on real time, two way (RTTW...a cumbersome but useful acronym coined by ABI Research) solutions, from subscription based to paid for completely by ads. They're all getting lumped under a common umbrella but in fact have very different business models. 2008 is the year to test these models and see which make sense. 

By: Marc Prioleau (Marketing Guy)
Created: 1/2/08

Happy New Year all.  I hope you had a good holiday and got some rest. 

Continuing in my "it's gonna be a good year" theme, I saw this preliminary report from Amazon saying that they bucked the trend to a relatively slow holiday season because of sales of Garmin PND's.  They don't release unit sales volumes; just say that "if they were lined up together, they would stretch from New York to Philadelphia—81 miles as the crow flies".  Huh??? I'm going to try to use that on my sales forecast next time.  Thankfully, the nice folks at Location News interpret that at about 1.3-1.5 million units based on an average width of 3.5 - 4 inches.  That sounds like a lot from one brand at one retailer.  Maybe they didn't take them out of the box when they lined them up...  Either way, it sounds like a bunch.

By: Marc Prioleau (Marketing Guy)
Created: 12/21/07

I have seen this company around for a while and don't know much about them.  They just launched a widget for outdoor navigation on ULocate's Where platform.  This is my candidate for best company name though...Fugawi...as in "where the...".

By: Marc Prioleau (Marketing Guy)
Created: 12/21/07

Apologies for the Spice Girls reference, but it's good to see this study out from Leo J. Shapiro & Associates saying that the number one thing people want on their cell phones is GPS.  24% of us want GPS compared to 19% who want Internet access.  That, combined with the Nielsen study showing that LBS application revenues make up over 50% of all application revenues are pretty good signs that 2008 will be a good year for mobile LBS.  It gets at two things that have been eluding the location market for a long time:

1. People know what GPS is and want it.  I was doing some Christmas shopping at Costco last night (no, I didn't give my wife a 5 gallon jar of pickle relish) and saw a swarm of people in one area.  I thought it must be some tasty food-like product, but no...it was a Magellan PND display.  That's been a while coming and I believe the PND boom will carry over into the mobile market.  It's got to be what's driving the Shapiro survey results and NIM and TeleNav are already seeing it in their numbers.
2. The carriers are finally making some money off LBS.  The Nielsen report points to good adoption and high ARPU.  The money is still concentrated in the navigation apps but that's a good place to start.  There's a lot of room to grow; penetration is still below 5% of subscribers even on a leader like Verizon.

The pacing item seems like it will be availability of GSM based services.  It takes a while to get GPS-enabled devices deployed but every cycle we see more.  There are a lot of other dynamics driving the trend that will all help: adoption of data plans, open architectures like android driving application development, Nokia's initiatives in LBS, etc.  I've been wrong before, but all together it gives me a good feeling for 2008.

By: Marc Prioleau (Marketing Guy)
Created: 12/20/07

Qualcomm has been supplying GPS in its handset chips for a while, powering a lot of the CDMA based LBS solutions.  Now it looks like they're expanding their horizons with a new chipset call Gobi which gives GPS capability to notebooks.  Joe Francica at Directions Magazine blogged it here. I talked with a big computer manufacturer about putting GPS in notebooks 4 years ago and didn't get it at the time.  Now, with the increased attention on location based advertising, it makes more sense.  There are a bunch of other non-obvious uses as well  like authenticating software.  It didn't mention UMPC's but that's got to be an interesting market.  It will be interesting to see how Qualcomm does moving off it's home turf and onto SiRF's domain.