Verizon APIs: Ubiquitous Location Arrived Yet?
At long last the age of LBS is finally upon us. Well at least that is what Loc-Aid CEO Rip Gerber is saying upon the news Tuesday that Verizon had announced, at it’s developers conference, the availability of 20 APIs that, among other things, would finally allow developers relatively open access to location data from Verizon’s 90 million + users.
Up until now, access to such data required reaching out and working directly with Verizon to obtain and use the information, on a case by case basis, something that didn’t happen much. The newly released APIs will change all of that, allowing developers more streamlined access and allowing added value service providers like Loc Aid and Location Labs to finally offer a complete coverage offering, allowing unified location based services across all tier one carriers in the U.S.
Why are folks like Loc Aid and Location Labs so excited about this development? Well, Read more
Stupid GPS Marketing Tricks
So the potential for GPS tracking as a marketing tool seem immense. A couple of years ago, Heineken affixed beer trucks with GPS tracking devices, and another clever agency created a kinda cow/bull gambling game where you could login into your PC anywhere in the world and try to determine which quadrant in a field a cow in Ireland would be in at any point in time, thanks to the connected GPS device around its neck.
Well the NY Times Magazine had an article on yet another instance. A marketing firm doing work for design studio and furniure maker client Blue Dot, decided to attach GPS devices to a bunch of Blue Dot’s Real Good Chair’s and then leave them out on the curbs throughout the NYC area. I am not sure how it is in other areas of the world, but in New York City its not uncommon for folks to simply discard of unwanted items by leaving them on the curb with their trash for pickup… and its equally commmon that one mans trash is another mans treasure, and good items will never be around long enough on the street to see the back of a garbage truck… being carted away by random passers by.
So long story short, the new chairs were quickly whisked away, and the dumpster diving street shoppers were tracked down to give their story. The marketing firm and chair manufacturer probably got some good cheap buzz and word of mouth out of it, and got 12 people with a single dining room chair in their home, probably in need of at least three more to match.
Maybe this will be the start of a new marketing strategy, so long “buy one get one free”, how about “(dumpster) dive one free… pay for three”. Catchy?
Warning to Sprint Customers…
Thinking of knocking over a bank? Be sure to leave that phone at home. An Indiana University student was hanging out at a wiretapping and interception conference in Washington DC, gathering information for his PhD thesis, and was suprised to hear that law enforcement had used Sprint’s nifty new self service web site for law enforecment to pull up Sprint customers historical GPS data a whopping 8 million times over 13 months. Chris posts more details and audio from the event on his blog.
Am I suprised that the goverment actively looks up peoples location data, no. Am I surprised that they did it 8 million times, well yes! Maybe they should lend the login to the Sprint field sales team so they can track down and give a personal face to face pitch to the ~1 million customers that Sprint is losing each quarter!
3G = GPS, Government and Glitches
Unlike reading a corporate report, where bad things are often described as ‘soft’, ‘sub optimal’ and ‘unfavorable’, the GAO doesn’t mess around with such niceties and refreshingly, yet starkley, tells it more like it is. The title says it all “GPS: Significant Challenges in Sustaining and Upgrading Widely Used Capabilities” and it only gets worse from there… some key thoughts:
- The US Govt recognizes GPS as “a key tool in an expanding array of public service and commercial applications” and “In light of the importance of GPS… GAO was asked to undertake a broad review of GPS.” and what was found was well seemingly a mess, and a mess with potentially big consequences…
- The guys put in charge of GPS, the Air Force, are not sure they’ll be able to get new satellites up to replace the old ones in time to ensure uninterrupted service. See the chart above showing the probabilities of having the full 24 satellite constellation. Depending on which and how many satellites fail without replacements, this would mean that not only could consumers not know to take a left in 1/4 mile, but also maybe our military’s smart bombs could becoming dumb bombs as soon as next year.
- What seems to be the problem with getting the satellites up? Well the Air Force can’t seem to stick to a budget and schedule… currently at three years late and at $1.6B…more than twice the original budget of $729 million… citing ‘significant technical problems’ and the lack of one central point of authority to guide the project… even with the admission that “GPS had already been ‘done’ before.”
- contributing factor #1: too many cooks in the kitchen and different priorities between military folks and commercial oriented folks about requirements of the system
- contributing factor #2: its so hard to find good help these days. From cnet there were problems with mergers related to their GPS vendors”the aerospace and defense bits of Rockwell were acquired by Boeing shortly after it won a GPS contract. A year later, Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas. The work was moved again. Next Boeing acquired Hughes Electronics’ space and communications business, which meant another move; all the while shedding “valuable workers and knowledge.”
The net net here seems to be that there needs to be a government GPS czar who makes all the decisions and leads the project. Any takers?
SiRFs Year Long Wipeout Finally Ends
Today the company announced that it was “merging” with CSR, a UK company which specializes in developing Bluetooth chips, with more minor initiatives in GPS and wifi. Sirf was purchased in an all stock transaction valued at $136 million. Sirf had cash and cash equivalents of $115 million as of the end of year 2008, so not much value placed on the remaining assets there.
As a company with an amazing 80%+ market share just a few years ago, I thought for sure SiRF had a better and brighter future in front of themselves with a strong balance sheet and location awareness becoming more and more mainstream, going into phones, cameras, cars and everything else.
I think I’ll go back and spend some more time with this one to try to learn from my errors. I was a bit suprised that the company never seemed to move very aggresively in the hybrid location technologies beyond GPS, but I am not sure that would have made much of a difference in the end.
CSR seems to bring some specialtise in bringing together hybrid technologies and also has a lot of relatonships with major phone manufacturers that make it look like SiRF will be a great deal for them.
I guess the lesson learned is that apparently it’s not enough to develop a bunch of IP and patents and to focus on one market, and to do just one thing very well in the hyper competitive world of technology today.
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!
Garmin Update
In case you missed it Garmin was out with results this week… TomTom as well, but I’ll try to get to them later:
In addition to the official slides and announcement here are some random tidbits from the Q&A session of the analyst call for Garmin from the call transcripts
- 2007 sales up 80% over 2006
- Auto category sales (Garmin includes PNDs in this category) are now nearly 75% of the company’s sales versus 61% a year ago… in other words sales of Nuvi’s are on fire.
- Margin was down but better than internal estimates, in part due to higher than expected geographic mix, ie more sales in the U.S. where margin is better.
- Speculation that overall PND penetration rate could be in broad range of 20-50%
- Expect 20-25% market share in Europe
- Expect additional 20% price reduction in 2008, offset partially by 10% reduction in component costs, with low hanging fruit in components being display and Flash memory
Nuvifone
- Doesn’t expect Nuvifone to cannibalize PND sales
- No carrier agreements for Nuvifone, they’re actively having many discussions, and would like as many carriers as possible
- Expect to use non Garmin manufacturing facility for the device
- Expect Nuvifone margins to be roughly the same or slightly lower than current PND margins
What the heck is eGPS?
It’s essentially trying to do a better job of assisting the GPS chip (similar to aGPS) in getting its bearings when it can’t see the satellites it needs or when the chip awakens out a deep sleep and awakens all disoriented. I am sure we’ve all had the experience of waking up after a long night after traveling or drinking and having those few moments where you think “where am I, what time is it??’ Well think of eGPS as your friend that is there when you wake up that says, “hey man its 10:25 and your at my house on my couch, there’s the front door!” Well, you would have figured that all out on your own eventually but your friend ,or own personal eGPS, just sped up the process for ya. That’s essentially what it’s all about.
GPS can certainly use all the help it can get in urban canyons and other challenging environments… but it looks like this new eGPS, like the old aGPS, requires carriers to deploy eGPS server around the networks, which isn’t a small project. So I’d file it under the category of cool things to look out for, only if a cooler thing doesn’t come along to leapfrog it before it has a chance to ramp up.
The GPS Business News article does a much better job of explain the ins and outs and pros and cons and I suggest it for anyone interested in more details.
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