Thomas' Telematics and LBS Blog

GPS Business News editor Ludovic Privat and I have agreed to disagree about the PND market …

I believe we are seeing the end of the PND growth in the US and Europe. In CEE, the market is just starting and the growth is there – as well as in the Middle East, where demand not only exceeds supply but users want more than what’s currently on offer.

China’s PND market is not a healthy one:  too much on offer, map piracy, inadequate profits for the hardware guys...

I recently had the chance to talk to Graham Wallace, Business Strategist at ESRI

Graham and I sat down to discuss the issues facing the telematics / logistics and IT industries. ESRI (UK) has invested quite a bit of time in order to understand the main trends and identify the main issues that will emerge over the next few years in all three areas.

As I was investigating the deals with Appello (again, well done to them for pulling eleven operators in Europe based on a €10 subscription business model), I was very keen to see the relationship between the app developer and the operator.

Well, I was quite surprised...

Mobile handsets present a unique challenge for application providers in that the interface, computing power and bandwidth constraints are severely limiting. The complexity of wireless networks, and the breadth of diverse platforms and models and vendors add to the difficulties. On top of that they have to deal with the GIS data and mapping on mobile handsets.

Application providers now have to deliver all that at once: Location-based middleware solution, GIS engine, client server, and even (if they plan to make some money out of the application) the ad server.

GPS has been free from the start, but at the excellent Navigation & Location Europe conference in Amsterdam, the buzz was all about free access of Cell-ID location data.

Why is Cell-ID such a very sexy topic these days?

I was looking for examples of interesting and innovative location technology when I came across the announcement that Rosum Corporation has received $15 million in new financing from several sources including new investor TruePosition.

Rosum licenses a technology that enables Mobile TV equipped devices to use the broadcast signal to complement GPS (well, I think….)

From 3GSM, it was clear that EVERYBODY is trying to make applications that will run on advertising. Social networks are a good example of apps that spend half their time developing something that makes you waste a huge amount of time and the other half on creating the framework for delivering ad revenue through monitoring usage.

Sadly for us, the media buyer's interest in location apps on mobile devices is proportional to their share in that market. About 2%. So we won't be seeing localised LBS financed purely from advertising tomorrow.

I always thought Zigbee and UWB were cool technologies looking for a problem to solve. While Zigbee might not yet have found a usage case, it seems Ultra Wide Band (UWB) has plenty to go for.

UWB is a high-bandwidth, short-range, ultra-low-power wireless technology. Current products average data transfer rates of 480 to 500 Mbps (millions of bits per second), but, even as you read this, developers are pushing the limits toward the gigabyte range.

The announcement from Microsoft that it would integrate RFID data usage in its mobile device platform makes a lot of sense.

Slowly but surely, the sensor and chip manufacturing industry seem to be a) talking to each other / buying each other, or b) talking about the need to make location work on mobile devices.

It’s about time.