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.

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.