Here're my takeaways from the Navigation & Location 2008 conference:
A number of the major vendors - Navteq, TomTom, Nokia, INRIX, Dash etc. - in the space were talking about user-generated content. Generally classified into two areas:
1) Passive sharing: location (through GPS probes), mileage, acceleration etc. TomTom said they had collected 1.8 trillion data points (synched through their PC client). Dash, famously, uses real-time GPS probe data, in addition to INRIX's traffic data, to create traffic feeds for Dash device users. There are uses for historical probe data as well.
2) Active sharing: speed traps, police cars, incident reporting, map corrections etc. Trapster, Tomtom's Safety Camera POIs, DriveCam's video capture etc.
Now that these PNDs and navigation software are in the hands of millions of users, these organizations are trying to figure out how to get users to actively input data in return for some value such as free routing information or mobile applications. Seems like the user feedback is reasonably positive on the idea of active sharing - users are likely to agree to share their data anonymously. Some highly active users are also likely to (Wikipedia-style) correct bad data - one example is Google's Mapmaker software introduction.
Other general feedback from the conference:
- PND market is still growing in unit volume but prices have crashed - Black Friday prices were especially discounted to levels as low as $99. According to some people at the conference, Dash and Magellan seemed to be exiting the market. Best Buy's PND entry signals how private-labelled products are coming into the market in a vertically integrated manner, potentially in response to the high customer demand but very low margins available to standalone PND vendors.
- Advertising-supported services are 3+ years out (at scale). Unit volumes provided by automotive OEMs will never be big enought so support advertising. Perhaps aggregation of users across multiple automotive OEMs + multiple CE vendors + mobile devices will provide the volume over time. Some speakers mentioned $35-45 CPMs - these CPMs will drop precipitously given that early campaigns are experimental and we are also in a recession for several years. It was also pretty evident that CE device makers and navigation software makers need to really come up to speed on how media & advertising really works - there were lots of references to the cringe-worthy example of "driving past a Starbucks and getting a coupon pushed to you."
- Vendors are vertically integrating into each others' spaces. Telenav's PND offering is an example. Best Buy's PND offering is an example. Decarta, Jentro, Telenav, NIM may all be competing with each other. The mapping vendors are providing several types of value-added data on top of their maps. Of course, the mapping vendors have been acquired by device makers (Nokia & TomTom).
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