INRIX and Microsoft provide free, instant voice-enabled access to local traffic information to mobile phone users across all major metropolitan areas.

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...

While I agree that there is a place in the market for all-in-one devices, I have a personal problem with them. 

Sure, they're convenient.  Why carry half a dozen dedicated devices around if you can have one multi-purpose device that does all those jobs just as well?

But do they?  I mean, do any of these multi-tasking devices actually do the job as well as any one piece of specialised equipment?

Of course they don't. Only women can truly multi-task, and do it properly :-)

What an exciting week for location news. Since I arrived back from the Navigation & Location Europe conference in Amsterdam it’s been all go for Nav&Loc!

 

Garmin recently announced: "Garmin Mobile for Blackberry introduces a lifetime of navigation".

Only available in North America for customers who prefer a one-off payment rather than continuous monthly payments, the one-time purchase is $99.99, as opposed to $9.99 per month.

What's the catch?

The one-time purchase plan is not transferable between BlackBerry devices.

TomTom has reported an 83% decline in net profit for the first quarter of 2008. Is this a sign of things to come for the PND market and navigation industry? Are the good times over? Have a look at the official quarterly results here. In 2007 Q1 net profits were €44 million, but you'll notice that Q1 2008 there was a significant decline to €7 million.

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.