DASH Navigation: Right Turn Ahead
DASH Navigation announced that it is getting out of the device business and laying off a bunch of staff, although it is still looking to make a run at it as an application and service provider. There is a good summary of what went down on GPS Business News, even if I don’t agree with all the points.
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.
NuviFone: NuviNirvana Or NuviNightmare for Garmin?
Garmin had their 3Q quarterly earnings announcement yesterday, and amid all the revenue, earning and profit hullabaloo, they also announced “Game On” for the launch of the Nuvifone in the first half of 2009.
With GPS introduced as a standard feature in the new 3G iPhone in June and the more recent announcement of the availability of the Android G1 phone from T Mobile, there was the feeling among some that maybe Garmin would have a change of heart and take the opportunity to holler “Car!”, grab their ball and make a run for the house and never come back out. But no, the game is still on.
While I was, and still am, quite excited about the prospects of Garmin bringing their NuviFone to market, six months ago I would have been one of the first in line, but now I have since become a happy iPhone owner and now I am not so sure I’ll be making a change anytime soon. And when the subject comes up about Garmin entering into the super competitive smartphone market, what I mostly hear from industry type folks is “what the hell are they thinking?”
So what does Garmin have going for it to think that it can make a good business out of developing and launching a location centric smartphone? Some thoughts:
Destination: NuviNirvana
My guess is that Dr. Min Kao’s thinking went something like this:
-Despite what some people think, creating a great turn by turn navigation experience is as close as it gets to rocket science in the consumer electronics space, and we think we do a pretty good job at manipulating complex technologically to create awesome consumer experiences, so how hard can it be to go do a phone?
- Mobile location awareness is really the next big thing that will change everything about the mobile phone experience, people just haven’t been able to truly experience it yet because those other losers bury GPS functions deep in the deck next to the calculator and the latest release of Bejeweled. Make it front and center and people will eat this stuff up!
-The market was headed toward connected PNDs anyway, and there is no way in hell that we we’re going the MVNO route… no one will pay a monthly fee on their PND and I just don’t want to deal with that mess. Wait, I know, let’s just add in the original killer app of voice calls to our PND and call it a phone instead, people have no problem paying monthly fees for phones.
-We’ve already invested so much in developing manufacturing and distribution capabilities and those guys are going to get bored soon if all we’re selling is a few million navigation devices, these guys need more stuff to manufacture and distribute and world wide demand for phones is something like 2.3 bazillion…. If we can just get 1% of that market we will all be rich! 
Destination: NuviNightmare
Meanwhile in the other corner, the “have you heard of a little company called Motorola” crowd, where the argument goes something like this:
-Are you insane! Even the people who have been in the phone hardware business for years and years, no longer want to be in the hardware business anymore. It’s turning into a low margin, commodity business. Customers are fickle, and want to pay all of $20 for a phone that does everything but wash the car for you.
-Android and the iPhone are rapidly changing the game. Customers no longer expect to be able to do 4-5 things on their phone like make a phone call, check email, send a text, etc. They now expect to be able to do 500 things including… check in on Facebook, watch the latest YouTube video, browse their web photo collection, read the newspaper, trade stocks, listen to music, all while playing real-time head to head mobile AirHockey against their roommate.
-Yeah, you may know navigation, but this ain’t navigation and you’re a couple of decades behind in learning what folks want from their phones.
-Want to do business in the U.S? Well, remember those millions of little guys who you once considered your customers, well no more, now you have one big customer, meet Mr. Carrier.
Well so far, NuviNirvana seems to be winning the battle at least among the folks that matter, Min and crew. But I am frankly not sure what I think about the whole thing. But I do know that there are some things that could really make this interesting:
-An Android Nuvifone. This would solve the problem of not being able to have those 500 different apps that could put the NuviFone at a disadvantage. Not sure how feasible this would be with the way that Garmin (not unlike Apple) really likes to keep a stranglehold grip on the user experience. But undoubtedly an interesting partnership.
-Garmin isn’t thinking Navigation, but instead a portfolio of services built on top of location awareness. In other words, they have downloaded, played with and called the developer of every application in the iTunes App store that makes use of location data. Google search is certainly a start, but hopefully is just one of dozens of similar partnerships.
-Garmin moves away from its roots and has some sort of back up positioning besides GPS for indoor and other GPS compromised environments.
-Garmin is aggressive in implementing features that not only allow the owner of the phone to know their own whereabouts and what is around them but to broadcast out their whereabouts to others with a robust set of security controls of course.
-Some technological innovation that can allow the GPS or other location identifying technology to remain always on in the background without killing the battery. There is a big difference between this passive vs active location awareness and the types of services that can be offered.
Stay tuned… maybe Garmin can pick and up run with what Apple started.
Can Best Buy Do PNDs?
I saw the news recently that Best Buy plans to introduce its own line of personal navigation devices under its Insignia brand expected to be available in stores October 19.
DASH API’s Part Two
For those not inclined to dig around for yourselves and see what the DASH APIs can do, here is the abbreviated version:
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.
DASH APIs – A closer look
I was excited to see the announcement a few weeks ago that DASH had opened up their Dash Navigation devices by providing developers with APIs to allow DASH users to receive 3rd party data on their device. The company claims their initiative is the ‘first GPS provider to open its service platform to third party developers”. You may be scratching your head having recalled API efforts from Garmin and TomTom announced over the past 3-4 years, specifically the Garmin Communicator Plugin and TomTom Navigator SDK were both designed for similar purposes in mind. Although I think the key difference here is the “3rd party developer” part. Since DASH devices are connected devices, what we’re really talking about here is the ability for a 3rd party to DYNAMICALLY pass their third party data over the Internet to Joe consumers’ device. With previous generations of PNDs not having the benefit of connectivity, previous APIs were more geared toward allowing the hard core geo geeks to add their own waypoints and tracks to THEIR OWN DEVICE (think Geocaching). Kudos to DASH for pushing the envelope here.
The APIs are currently relatively simple in what they can provide. Essentially if you’re the happy owner of location relevant data that you think would be valuable to a DASH users, you can now develop a little application that will allow DASH users to pull in the data relevant to their location through the DASH device if they think it’s worthy. A device owner must decide that one of the providers DashApps offerings looks interesting enough to add to their device through the MyDash portal. Once on the device the user proceeds to the search function on their device and navigates to the DashApp they added, where the location relevant information is presented to them. DASH announced their first five partners (follow link for demos) with the public introduction of the availability of the APIs including the ability to get location relevant listings on weather conditions, real estate home listings, speed traps. The speed trap application allows DASH users to not only receive a listing of location relevant speed traps, but to also report new traps directly through the device. Other applications include syncing your calendar, including the location of upcoming meetings to your DASH device as well as the ability to hear the last three songs played by radio stations in your vicinity.
Only limited functionality has been exposed so far, but the next phase is obviously on its way like the ability to change the distance radius included in search results, the number of items to return in each request, and probably most importantly potentially the ability to pull the data out of the purgatory of the search section of the device.
Overall it’s very encouraging to see this effort, and hopefully Garmin and TomTom take notice and get rolling on the next version of their own APIs.
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
Nuvi Phone
-
Sponsored Links
