Nuvi Phone
January 30, 2008 · Posted in Commentary, Companies
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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