I believe that there is, and still will be, some enormous value created by what they were trying to do… creating a real time connection between mobile location aware devices and location centric information with Navigation capabilities at the center. When someone recognizes this sort of opportunity and takes huge risks to try to make it happen, you can’t help but root for them to succeed and to show the way for the rest of the bigger and slower guys to follow.

As I had mentioned in previous posts, while it is still early times for their APIs, both in terms of adoption and functionality, they still seem to be many years ahead in taking the learning from the successes of the likes of the FaceBook and iPhone application development initiatives and the potential power they can yield. And their mere presence seems to have at least poked folks like TomTom into action with similar initiatives.

Chalk their “failure” up to the usual suspects, take your pick:
- The MVNO model doesn’t work in the United States certainly not for voice products and not for data with any stand alone consumer product that I’ve seen (if someone knows of one please do let me know).
- Being in the consumer electronics hardware business is tough for everyone, even tougher if you’re new to it and don’t do your own manufacturing.
- Its not a great time to be selling an expensive, luxury product to consumers
- How difficult it is to get retail distribution for new unproven products , no matter how innovative

The good side of this, is that it gets them out of a business that they probably should have never been in the first place, you can probably blame that one on management feeling the need to put $70 million to use, when building an application platform would have only costs a tiny fraction of that amount.

I wonder what the success rate is for tech companies chasing the dream of high margin, monthly recurring consumer revenue? It can’t be good , but I guess those one in a million runaway winners like AOL keep people coming back to try and try again to find that service that tips the scale just enough. By the way if anyone has any tips on how to cancel my friggin AOL service, I am all ears… I’ve been trying to do so for five years now!

The fall back plan for DASH could of course be the equally popular Silicon Valley model of giving it away for free to get enough people hooked and then making money from the advertising model… which doesn’t seem out of the question.  Although I think they’d have to stop thinking of themselves as a in vehicle navigation company and instead think of building a more broad LBS platform to include phones as well. Either way, folks like Microsoft SYNC and Garmin should at least be taking a good sniff around.

First the APIs currently available are for “Dynamic Search” which is a bit of a misnomer if you ask me. The “Dynamic” mostly just means that the results from the “search” are relevant to your location… so as your location changes so will the subsequent results from the “search” request. The “search” is not really a search as much as a filtering of the data from a single predefined database so as to only show data relevant to your location.

There is a widget type feature that allows a DashApp to be discovered and added directly to a Dash Navigation device directly from any website, rather than having to go through the MyDash service. Sure to be a popular viral marketing feature for app builders.

A limited number of HTML tags are also supported to allow application developers to control some of the look and feel of their data within the Dash device.
While all results are seemingly related to the users’ geographic location, results can be sorted by a variety of values not limited to distance, including by title, time/date, price and rating.

Elements of a response can include details such as title, description, time, phone, lat/long, street address, city, state, zip, distance from the user, price and rating.

It also seems that DASH is rightfully being quite judicious with the amount of data that it lets DashApps use, 5k per query it seems. At that rate I suppose they can allow users a fairly large amount of use, before they really start to eat into that pool of GPRS data.

The initial DashApps made available with the launch of the APIs include straightforward POI lookup services including real estate listing from Coldwell Banker and speed trap data from Trapster. Trapster includes the capability for device owners to report/submit new speed traps directly from their device. The weather service from WeatherBug and the BackTrax applications are less location sensitive but more dynamic. WeatherBug provides up to date weather condition and forecasts in your area, while BackTrax lets users look up the name of the last three songs played on all the radio stations in your area. The final inaugural application is called myFUNABOL calendar which allow you to import electronic calendars from places like outlook into the device.

This is undoubtedly a huge step in the right direction, and is a mere trickle of the types of location aware information I think we can expect to see turn into a tidal wave in the not too distant future. Despite the widely reported problems the Dash devices have in terms of size and poor basic GPS performance, it certainly makes me want to run out plop down my $399, at least until the Nuvifone hits shelves. I certainly hope Garmin has been watching DASH carefully and has been taking notes.