Wait, I know… maybe a retro 90′s book brand instead! If Knight Rider wasn’t your thing then why not the lovable, easy to understand for Dummies branded PNDs for those with an eversion to all things technical. Yes, seriously there is a for Dummies line of personal navigation device… evidently it goes for as low as $89.99 at your local CVS.

Watching the developments in the PND market these days feels an awful lot like watching the waning episodes of Happy Days where fresh out ideas, desperate for sale and wanting to milk a trend for all its worth, while doing as little new innovative work as possible, we’re seeing folks resort to placing cheap, easy and desperate bets to delay the inevitable.

Can the GM Kitt 2010 concept car be too far off?

So does this mean we’re reaching the end for PNDs in general, or is there another explaination? I am sure many of you have seen this before but there is a company called Gartner which is a technology research and advisory firm which looks at stuff like this. A while back Gartner came out with this idea of the Hype Cycle to explain how new technologies gain and grow adoption through a number of cycles… most notably that there is an early period of frenzy and excess public enthusiasm which ultimately hits a wall, followed by a period of disillusionment before the technology revitalizes itself, often in a more useful and widespread way.

In terms of GPS and location awareness technology, I suspect that we are passing from the irrational exuberance stage around navigation and into the retrenchment phase where the next more powerful incarnation is currently being formulated.

While many companies at this point are becoming dissolusioned with the future prospects for navigation devices, there is a new breed of companies (and some new innovative products from old companies like Garmin) that are busy layering in search and social networking capabilities to take-up where the “navigation only” systems left off, as they realize that there are more broad benefits from location awareness then knowing where you are, where you want to go and how to navigate there.

The world always just seems to zig, when everyone is calling for it to zag.

On a related note, I noticed the news out of the New York auto show where Ford unveiled its Transit Connect service (which already includes some gimmicky RFID features) and GM its new internet and wi fi offering which will bring internet connectivity to their latest vehicle lines… so maybe we will have connected PNDs afterall, just with your Caddie providing the Internet connection rather than device makers like Garmin.

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.

As soon as Apple opened their app store I loaded every application I could find that looked like it might make cool use of location awareness, and I must say that after playing around with quite a few, Loopt certainly seems like the best so far… not including the Google powered maps application that comes standard.

But before I get too far along in my experiences with the various applications, I think that everyone that is currently making a living or hoping to make a living in the world of LBS, needs to drop whatever they’re doing and personally write a hundred thank you notes to Steve Jobs and all the staffers over at Apple that made location awareness such an important part of the iPhone (for the computer geeks among us, the thank you notes are that stack of little square pieces of paper that your grandmother gave you that you stuck in the bottom drawer of your dresser).

Ok so with that out of the way, there are a number of finder applications available for the iPhone and they’re all trying to do something slightly different: find friends, find places, find events, etc. From the initial batch that became available with the launch of the app store I tried Loopt, Yelp, Eventful, Whrrl, Where, EarthComber, Limbo and Nearby.

The only ones that I still use today are Loopt and Yelp.

You can tell from using the application that Loopt has been doing this for a while, and has learned the pain points for consumers and has done a great job of streamlining and simplifying the interface… there is a difference between complexity and power that I think Loopt gets… Loopt is not complex, but that doesn’t mean it’s not powerful.

First of all, getting a new Loopt account up and rolling was super easy, in fact it was so quick and painless that I’ve long since forgotten exactly what I had to do, I think it was just supplying my phone number and maybe a password… but I remember going from tapping on the icon to having a new account in well under a minute, and that’s all that matters.

Next it allows me to add friends either by typing in their phone number or going through and selecting friends from my iPhone contacts… again a very easy process.

The maps are provided by Microsoft Virtual Earth and are great quality and easy to navigate around through one finger panning and zooming, and they’ve partnered with Yelp to help beef up the POI listings and reviews.

Updating your friends on “What’s Up” is another simple 2 step process, just click on “What’s Up” and “Update” or feel free to add a blurb or photo (either from the camera or from your saved pictures) about what you’re up to.

But the coup de gras, is the link you can create with a Loopt Facebook widget. Once you’ve added the application to your Facebook account and linked it with your mobile application, all of your updates feed into your Facebook account and show up on your wall. This is important for me because at this stage in the game finding friends that can or want to get Loopt is not easy, so being confined just to Loopt with just my tech savvy friends would be a pretty lonely experience, but the Facebook updating utility allows me to connect with my larger group of Facebook friends, even if it is just for me to post “What’s Up”… in fact I now find myself providing updates through Loopt instead of directly via Facebook.

Now I am hoping that they come out with an embeddable widget where I can add my location and ‘What’s Up’ in places besides Facebook, like the Skyhook/Loki widget.

The Others

Ok so here is a quick rundown of my experiences with Yelp, Eventful, Whrrl and Where. I’ll save the others for another post, another day:

Yelp, is also another well done and slick application, although I think they still have some work to do in organizing the information. The default categories include categories that seem random to me… are that many people really looking for coffee & tea? Maybe so but not me. And when I search for restaurants around me, there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason behind the results provided, which I find frustrating… the top 10 results can be up to 20 blocks away, even when there are obviously ten restaurants closer… it seems to be taking into account quality/popularity in addition to proximity but the heck if I can figure out how to change the default setting. In reality I don’t typically get the results I want from proximity searches, although when I already know the name of the restaurant I do use the Yelp search function to get a better idea about the restaurant before committing to going.

I loaded up Eventful hoping to be able to quickly find nearby and last minute activities around the city to do with my kids, ala GoCityKids. In reality Eventful on the iPhone seems to really focus on the young hipster crowd looking for a band or show. I tried playing around with it anyway to see if I could find a upcoming and nearby college football game to go watch in the New York City area… a search for “college football’ returned some comedian’s routine under “Events” and a midtown bar that evidently was showing the BCS championship game back in January under “Venues”. I know NYC is a bad town for college football, but c’mon it can’t be THAT bad!

Whrrl and Where were non starters for me.

Where kept crashing for the first few weeks I gave it a try, I tried again more recently and it seems a little bit more stable now, but I still get error messages. Like Yelp the organization of Where seems to leave quite a bit to be desired… I am still not sure what to do with Quibblo Polls, SkyMap or HeyWhatsThat (no mountains in NYC, so I assume I don’t need that) and I’ve tried signing up for Buddy Beacon twice now with no luck. Zipcar and Starbucks locators are nice, but I don’t drink much Starbucks coffee or rent Zipcar vehicles, so don’t need those either. The application feels like one of those really slick $2 million dollar commercials for a financial services company that forgets to put the name of the bank in at the end… in other words it gets you all worked up and interested through the slick look and feel, but then forgets what the original purpose was in the first place…

Whrll gave me major password problems. I had a Whrrl account from online that didn’t seem to work on the iPhone application, so I couldn’t get into it for a while. When I did get in I remembered that none of my other friends use it and I didn’t really care what other top Whrrlrs thought about stuff in my neighborhood. So despite a nice slick application, I can’t figure out what to do with it and don’t want to hound and explain to my friend why they should get on it. So I am taking that one off.

Look out for another post on round two of the iPhone location aware apps coming soon.

Well it seems that the connected PND is getting closer and closer to reality. TomTom announced that they’re working with Google to allow users to send locations to their portable navigation devices through the “send to GPS” feature within Google Maps. Try the video above, it pretty much explains it all. I am sure that no one at TomTom would admit it but they seem to be conceding that so far Google has developed the best method for getting accurate and updated POI data via their multi pronged approach (purchased data + Google Local Business Center + html page scraping patent). If consumers take advantage of this on a regular basis I wonder if TeleAtlas could also be keeping a copy of these POIs for themselves as a tool to help plug holes and fine tune in its own TeleAtlas POI database? If so, TomTom should promote the heck out of this service, with funding from the TeleAtlas product development budget!

On a related note, I am still not sure why this type of process still requires use of the tethered TomTom Home connection. Wouldn’t it be better if folks could pass this information around over the air? Say you’re trying to find a place to meet up with someone navigating around with a TomTom device, it would be great to pick a place to meet on a Google map and just send to your friends device directly via a wireless connection. I can certainly understand PND manufacturers not wanting to get into the MVNO businesses, but this is the logical next step and with the bluetooth connection already present in so many of these devices, all the parts are already in place. Anyone with any clue as to why this is not yet happening? Whats the hold up to sending map or POI data to PNDs over the air?

Well the company didn’t make it, for a variety of reasons that I won’t get in to, but it looks like Microsoft is channeling WavePhore ghosts in some research they’re conducting into a similar concept concerning delivering location relevant ads over Wi-Fi Networks. For those with hard core interests their paper makes for an interesting read, but for everyone else it essentially goes something like this:

Many Wi-Fi networks (if set up to do so, and most are) are constantly emitting beacons essentially saying ‘I am here” to allow potential users to find and connect. Whether or not you connect to the network or not the beacon from all networks in range will continually announce their presence and wireless (Wi-Fi) devices will always receive this announcement. The range for these beacons is limited to 100-200 meters so if you know the location of the thing transmitting, then you know the location of any recipient within that radius.

So what could happen is that simple ad messages or coupons (text, audio) could be ‘stuffed’ into this beacon and PUSHED out to any Wi-Fi enabled device within range. Some benefits of this approach are that it is device independent, doesn’t require an actual connection to be made, and is location relevant without being aware of specific device location, a nice privacy benefit.

I am a regular reader of Silicon Alley Insider (SAI) and usually love their articles… they certainly play looser with the facts at times than say at the New York Times, and would rather be wrong and apologize later then to be boring, which is why I like them so much, because although they’re often not fully on track, at least they take a great college try at getting into details that other journalists don’t even come close to touching and can admit when they screwed it up and get it wrong.

The writers at SAI have been huge fans of Carol Bartz and the things she is doing in her newfound reign as the lead Yahoo, which is why I was surprised to see them take such a negative view on a recent interview given by the head of Yahoo Search Strategy Prabhakar Raghavan. You can see Prabhakar’s comments for yourself in his own words via the allthingsd video above, but after hearing all the journalists and pundits hammer Yahoo over its lack of innovation in search, I found the comments from Prabhakar to be as dead on accurate as anything I’ve heard in a long time in that industry, and was surprised to see it dismissed by SAI as essentially over-thinking something that is “stupid simple”.

What’s all the fuss about? Well essentially WOO stands for “web of objects”… and quickly and painlessly connecting Yahoo users with the “object” they’re searching for is the focus of much of Yahoo search development efforts according to Mr. Raghavan. The question then becomes what the heck kinda “object” are we talking about here, which is where the whole thing turns a little obtuse.

Well, no worries… the good news is that what IT IS isn’t as important as what IT ISN’T… which is yet another webpage (which in the spirit of Yahoo, we’ll abbreviate as Yanw).

The point being made here is that webpages are very often merely a proxy/replacement for something else, the real thing of interest, and in many instances what someone really wants is something more than yet another webpage. This “more than yet another webpage” is the “object” in question here and could be damn well near anything including digital things like movies or MP3s, or real world things like people, or items like bikes, computers and movie tickets, etc.

Yahoo is simply recognizing that a webpage is often a means to an end and not the end in itself, and is evangelizing its desire to take out the middleman and directly connect their users not with yet another webpage but instead directly with the item their users are really in search of.

When what is being searched for transcends out of the virtual world to the physical one, obviously location awareness of both the searcher and the “object” becomes a huge piece of the equation… and a key component of the future Yahoo search strategy.

It seems that the folk that have found this most useful so far are governments and energy companies.  According to the Metacarta site, there are millions of government documents of which over 70% contain significant geographic references.

I can see how this would be quite valuable for the folks in homeland security who could now potentially  connect the dots where a CIA agent writes up a report about a suspicious character on Mott street and another agency transcribes a phone conversation between bad guys referencing a business at a nearby location adjacent to Mott street.  It’s information that may not have been connected in the past if it weren’t for the previously unseen geographic/proximity link.  

The other category where Metacarta operates is in digital publishing, particularly around news content and this is the area I was interested in poking at a bit more. AOL’s Patch product has been getting a ton of press, Yahoo just plunked down $100 million for Associated Content, and other start ups like Outside.in are all operating in some shape or form in the area of hyper local content creation or aggregation.

Creating or aggregating all of that content for a hyper local audience of what may be just a few thousand people seems like an awful lot of work. So let’s look at some numbers…

Having worked with Associated Content before I suspect that its reasonable to get a 500 word article produced for $30, and let’s say that the article is about something happening in the town of Mamaronek, New York  a small bedroom community of NYC  with a population of 18,752 (at least as of the last census). So using some oversimplified math… in order to break even on the expense of creating the article assuming un limited advertiser demand for Mamaronek eyeballs at $15 CPM, the article would need to attract 2,000 views, assuming 1 ad per page, or 1,000 views assuming 2 ads per page… or approximately 10.6 or 5.3% of the town population respectively.

Now seeing that Quantcast estimates the domestic use of Google.com at around 157 million monthly unique out of a total population of 307 million people or about 51%, it seems a tad aggressive to assume that one publisher could get 10% of a local population engaged in their content… although just for the heck of it I looked up the circulation of my hometown newspaper the Gainesville Sun which has a circulation of around 45k against a population of around 125k or over 1/3 of the population, so maybe its not so crazy!

You can kinda see where the Excel  commandos may be getting excited, saying something like “if we can establish Patch as the next generation local newspaper and get 1/3 of the population reading the site and get articles produced at $30 a pop, we’ll be rich!”

But here are a few potential glitches to that plan. For one, as the barrier to creating local content is lowered, unlike in the traditional newspaper world, the number of competitive neighborhood sites will  be more significant, so getting 1/3 of the population to read your website like the Gainesville Sun has accomplished in Gainesville, will be much more challenging… outside.in will be right there challenging Patch  for the local eyeballs with a network of other local bloggers. 

Second and probably more importantly, is the advertising demand and pricing question.  Ad networks are awash in inventory, and geo targeting is just a simple check box away, so the eyeballs are already available at CPMs in the low single digits.  While small local businesses will be sold directly and the vast majority have never heard of advertising.com, I am not sure you can expect them to pay large “local content adjacency” premiums over the long run.

A quick perusal through the Patch job listings shows a lot of emphasis on the business directories business, so it seems that AOL may be trying to hedge their bets even further against the premium display CPM ad business  and trying to cast a wide net capturing ad dollars previously headed for local premium display, classified, and yellow pages.  Then there is the whole behavioral/re targeting opportunities when folks from the local sites show up later elsewhere on an aol property and upgrade the value of that inventory as well.

You can start to see where this local content begins to look like a valuable opportunity once you can get the production costs low enough and local ad sales folks in place… it all makes sense on a spreadsheet at least.

Now in the olden days when you just bought a printed foldable map this didn’t really matter much, but nowadays in the modern inter networked world of digital maps and folks creating a dizzying array of new services helping connect people with locations, it matters more.  Now within a single stand alone application like say a TomTom navigation device there is probably not much thought put into what you name a place, but in the web2.0 world where interoperability and information sharing reign, everyone needs to know what location everyone else is talking about when someone is talking about the business at 4151 North Central Expressway.

So rather than just getting everyone to try to agree on a standard, which could take years and years and would probably be a lot like herding cats, Placecast has announced today that it has developed a technological solution to the whole problem and they’re opening it up for free use.

The product is called the Placecast Match API…. and it’s described as “a Rosetta Stone for location data”. For those that need a refresh on their ancient Egpytian artifacts, this basically just means that they will provide a way to translate between the different “languages” that different services use to describe locations for the purposes of enabling interoperability between those services.

There is a great article on Tech Crunch that demonstrates how this problem manifested itself in the hot area of mobile social networking and the battle of the check-ins where folks may want to check in somewhere on a number of different services without having to fire up each service independently and do it manually. Given the viral and social nature of services like Foursquare and Gowalla, I guess it’s not surprising that this is where we’d first see the need for better interoperability between services.

One area where this is particularly interesting is around the area of location based advertising. One of the things that needs to happen to help ramp up growth in this area is more scale in order to make hyper local and location oriented advertising finally get on the radar screen of folks that control advertising dollars. It’s not that there are not a lot of consumers using these types of services today, there are… but usage is spread around among a lot of player.  Consumers may look up directions via Google Maps, Yahoo Maps or Mapquest, others may rely on their Garmin or TomTom devices, while urbanites without cars may just be checking in with FourSquare, Goawalla or Loopt or using one of a hundreds of local discovery services like UrbanSpoon, Yelp, Where, Geodellic, etc.

The amount of traffic to any one hyper local area on any one of these systems is likely not significant enough to create a media buy, but centrally tether them all together with a common reference point and pretty soon you have what begins to look like the beginnings of a network… a point of interest advertising network. 

Putting banners in apps and on wap pages is one approach to the location based advertising opportunity, but there certainly seems to be just as much opportunity if not more around “listings ads” connecting mobile users with the businesses they’re looking for from mobile search and discovery services and then capturing, sharing and aggregating the related check ins at scale across the ecosystem.

I am not saying that this is the Placecast end game, but something like the Match API and other similar offerings by competitors certainly seem like it could help spawn competitors to what folks like CitySearch are doing with CityGrid around the creation of ad networks tied to places.

What will be interesting  is to see how publisher view participating in such a system and the more thorough socialization of content from their system… when the depth, richness and accuracy of that content may be a significant source of unique competitive advantage.

Another up and comer in this area, with a new twist, that is beginning to get some press is a company called Hot Potato.  Here is where they fit in:

What they do: They create an online social network around the dimensions of “here” and “happening now”.  Facebook has people at its center of gravity and Yelp has places (mostly businesses) as theirs. Folks like Foursquare and Gowalla have seen the value of connecting the two with gameplay around the places where people go. 

Hot Potato is similar, but with a focus not as much on the places themselves as on the live events happening either directly in a real nearby place or one 1,000 miles away. Think of it as a mobile or virtual social layer on top of eventful or meetup.com where folks check in to events to socialize.

How it works:  As with Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare and Gowalla, having your friends involved is a key component of the service.  So the first step is to invite all your friends with handy friend imports from Facebook, Twitter and Gmail supported. Once your friends are connected you can kind out what events they’re attending or create your own events and invite others to join you.  Like with Foursquare, people check in to an event in progress and can share comments and pictures with other attendees… events can be open to anyone or made private for only a select group to participate.

I can see this type of tool being particularly good for a business conference where everyone is there to network and share information and to socialize. I tried to set an event up for the Where2.0 conference happening in San Jose this week…  seems that no one found it and a new one was created instead… although even that one had just 16 folks check in and only on posting that I could see.

The Hot Potato service is just getting off the ground, and seems to be in its very early stages at this point, with many kinks to be worked out. The website seems to be down a lot, and I left a question with customer service five days ago about how to set up an event, and have yet to hear back.

For attending real world events at physical places it will be interesting to see if Hot Potato can find enough ways to differentiate itself with features targeting the needs of live event goers maybe around tickets and what to do afterwards. Currently there is not a lot more you can do with Hot Potato than what someone might find checking in somewhere like at Madison Square Garden for an event or at ‘Snowpocalypse’ on Foursquare… with their more loose interpretation of ‘place’.

The service is currently heavily used for ‘virtual events’ around social television watching, like March Madness or the latest episode of ABC’s Lost… making what for many is likely not a very social activity of sitting in front of the tv at home, a bit more virtually social at least. Although it feels like the live and in person events need a different set of capabilities than the virtual event attendance like watching a tv episode, so I suspect that at some point soon, Hot Potato may need to split and decide which market they’re after and how to really differentiate themselves.

Its an interesting enough twist however to continue to keep an eye on.