Jaty Electronics (www.jaty.co.kr) recently announced the launch of its navigation device JTNV-DR7200 for the Korean market. The unit has a handy breathalyzer feature for those late-night karaoke bar trips. What I want to know is which employee downed a beer to get the product shot of 0.02% BAC. Was that part of the job description?
Powered by a 533MHZ CPU and SiRFstar III GPS antenna, the JTNV-DR7200 also offers mountain, car, and golf GPS functionality, as well as mobile phone charger support. Other features include digital TV receiver w/picture-in-picture, multimedia player, photo viewer, FM transmitter, Bluetooth and more. For the Asian business exec who has it all.
The market has been flooded with PNDs from dozens of brands. A quick glance at GRMN shows how fast ASPs have dropped. So what’s an OEM to do? Differentiation through brand licensing, of course! Mio is launching a Knight Rider navigation unit this fall with MSRP around $270, complete with William Daniels’ KITT voice and LED bars of the original Knight Rider Pontiac Trans Am. Check out the demo video - I would actually fork over some cash for this. Lesson #1 on how to part a fool with his money.
Uniden is a relative newcomer to the GPS game, but it has years of experience in high-end radar detectors. So it’s no surprise that, come CES, it will be the first company to introduce a MapTrax GPS navigator with radar detection built in. This should be a profitable niche for Uniden, even as prices and margins are plummeting on mainstream PNDs. Of course, detectors are illegal in a few regions. Maybe Uniden will lock down the detector functionality in banned areas like Virginia by using GPS location.
InterMap Technologies recently announced the launch of AccuTerra, which provides existing outdoor GPS units and personal navigation devices (PNDs) with 3D maps and off-road points-of-interest (POI), integrated with interactive 3D rendering software. The product addresses a market that is currently limited to two-dimensional data and provides limited or no map coverage once users leave paved roads, the company says. AccuTerra will render trails and POIs in National Parks in the context of the natural terrain in which they exist. The product’s user interface includes:
realistic 3D views
accurate elevation information
clearly identified and classified trails, paths, and roads (overlaid on the 3D terrain)
outdoor-specific POI such as campgrounds, service facilities, and trailheads
routing to points of interest and tracking progress
a land use display that depicts the location of public and private property, including areas of restricted use
I must be a complete GPS nerd, because this is actually quite exciting. Off-road content substantially lags the mature routing and POI databases in traditional turn-by-turn navigation. It looks like InterMap has only mapped California to date, so it will be interesting to see if the response from PND manufacturers is high enough to justify continued investment in mapping the rest of the United States.
IMS Research’s analyst Matia Grossi forecasts that in 2008 GPS market growth will be felt in segments other than Personal Navigation Devices (PND), such as Digital Cameras, Laptops and PMPs (Personal Media Players), where a number of product announcements are expected in the second half of 2007. IMS Research believes that these three vertical markets will grow strongly in the following years jumping from below the half a million area in 2006 to 80 million units shipped in 2010, with penetration rates in some of these markets much higher than in cellular.
Grossi says: “It is unlikely that customers will use their digital cameras to navigate but they are most likely to use them for some form of social networking applications. Consumers have increasingly large online (and offline) picture libraries and location will be an important segmentation factor”.
Last week I profiled IntelliTours, a company that has produced audio tours for Garmin PNDs. I commented that their first betas - a few segments of Interstate 95 - were probably a mistake. I would rather wait for Yellowstone. Coincidentally, I just came across an interactive GPS tour from the National Park Service, Yosemite Association and Big Escapes. The trio came up with the Explorer, a handheld device that leads you on a personalized video tour of the Lower Yosemite Falls loop.
The Explorer works by determining your location and then guides you on a tour describing your surroundings and their significance. Visitors learn about fires and floods, learn about wildlife, and meet historic figures that changed Yosemite Valley first hand. There is even a trivia game using guide posts along the path to unlock secret messages.
Explorers are available through the Yosemite Valley Visitors Center. The tour costs $9.95 for adults and $7.95 for kids (3-12). For more information visit the Yosemite Valley Visitors Center, call 1-877-GPS-TOUR, or visit www.LowerFallsLoop.com. The groups are expected to offer more interactive GPS tours in other National Parks later this year.
The concept is great - I would definitely rent one of these with my family. Just some friendly advice to Big Escapes: also develop some audio-only driving tours for the National Parks that tourists can use on their existing navigation units.
Satellite navigation systems in cars can be hijacked remotely with relative ease, allowing hackers to feed drivers bogus directions, two experts told a major security conference in Las Vegas yesterday. The hack works on in-car Radio Data System (RDS) capable devices that are standard in Europe, and becoming increasingly common in North America.
While navigation systems plot routes using satellites and stored maps, the RDS-capable devices also receive perpetual updates about traffic accidents, road closures or weather conditions that sometimes call for setting new courses. The updated information is sent in packets of computer code on FM radio frequencies.
“We can see what is going on and change the destination,” Andrea Barisani said. “We can create bad weather, fresh snow, full car parks, accidents…close bridges, roads or tunnels, and the SatNav will pop-up a detour.” The two experts said they discovered pre-programmed alerts they could trigger, among them the messages “air raid,” “bomb,” “bull fight,” and “boxing match.”
Blogger Eirik Solheim writes about how he used a Nokia N95 to entertain his kids in the car:
I simply connected it to my son’s small DVD screen. Wow! Seven inches of pure joy for the small ones in the back. Changing view, colors and the language of the navigation voice keeps them happy. You need a Nokia with video out, a navigation system running on your nokia, a DVD system or screen for the kids with video in and a couple of cables. And some slightly geeky kids.
Check out the detailed step-by-step if you’re interested in pacifying your kids in the car without that Spongebob Squarepants DVD.
Last week, research company In-Stat said that U.S. cellphone owners who subscribe to phone-based navigation services will increase from 1.6 million in 2007 to 8.7 million by 2011. One reason for the projected gain is the relatively high price tags of personal navigation devices (PNDs), which retail anywhere from $200 to $600.
Future forecasts aside, In-Stat also surveyed more than 1,000 consumers and found that half would currently prefer to purchase a PND rather than subscribe to a handset navigation service. Only 17 percent said they wanted to use handset navigation, but the remaining 33 percent said they will probably use both handset navigation and a PND.
In-Stat also found that very few consumers could correctly identify whether their carrier offered handset navigation. “So the mobile carriers are really the ones that need to be promoting this and haven’t,” noted In-Stat principal analyst David Chamberlain.
I don’t have the detailed report to reference, but something’s not right here. Let’s see, $400 for a Garmin Nuvi or $10/month for Telenav on Sprint? And a full third of those surveyed said they would use both? I wonder how the responses would change if people knew about the navigation industry’s dirty little secret: free Google Maps w/GPS (running great on my Blackberry 8800). The bottom line is the lack of market awareness for handset navigation. Chamberlain is right - carriers need to do a better job of educating consumers on these services. After all, carriers are the sole distribution channel for the vast majority of LBS apps out there.
