Economics, technology advancements and even public awareness
have created a perfect market for navigation.
With seemingly no end in sight to the rising price of gas these days, I find myself more conscious of routes I take as I travel by car about town. This is reinforced every time I have to drop $50 at the gas pump.
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Rhonda Wickham
Editor-in-Chief |
Don’t get me wrong, I love to drive. In addition to driving to social and work events, I love to explore new neighborhoods and vary my regular well-trodden paths to and from my house just for a change in scenery. And this type of mini-adventurist in me costs me fuel. It also has resulted in getting lost or otherwise turned around at times. And further, with schedules being what they are, we all find ourselves pressed for time as well as a need to get from Point A to Point B as expeditiously as possible.
For instance, not long ago, I needed to drive from my home to the Kansas City Zoo for a benefit gala. My schedule was such that I had 30 minutes to make the typically 20-minute drive. Like many other trips, you can take the more circuitous route via freeway (it might take longer but there are not frequent stops and starts), or you can take the more direct route through town. I opted to cut through town as it was after rush hour. However, once I neared the vicinity of the zoo, the trick was navigating through the road construction and zoo renovation to find the African exhibit parking.
| Worldwide PND Forecast |
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Source: iSuppli Corp. September 2007 |
Although many people share in my driving passion and experiences, mere economics and time pressures are beginning to demand more targeted drives. Because of these economics as well as technology advancements and public awareness, I think we are on the threshold of seeing navigation systems explode from a “nice to have” to a “must have” feature.
Analyst firm iSuppli confirmed this recently by calling personal navigation devices (PND) a “$16.5 billion jackpot.” The firm says that the average selling price of PNDs fell 23% year-over-year in 2006 as vendors aggressively cut prices to maintain their share of sales amid tough competition. Even though the price has declined dramatically, the firm still expects to see a four-fold increase in revenue by 2013.
iSuppli estimates 40 companies now are offering GPS navigation capabilities on a range of products, from PNDs and embedded systems, to smartphones. And the company looks at the smartphone as the “igniter of the market.”
Although embedded systems such as OnStar and individual personal navigation devices such as Garmin offer separate solutions, the addition of GPS to the smartphone offers both Internet connectivity as well as better positional accuracy in rugged geographic locations thanks to assisted-GPS.
Meanwhile, location based services and mapping applications for mobile devices from a range of companies as well as the Yahoo!s and Googles of the world, will help us all get from Point A to Point B faster.
Back when I was a kid, my parents would regularly pack up my sisters and me in the family station wagon for a Sunday drive. These days, with gas closing in on $3 a gallon, that activity no doubt has been sharply curtailed. In today’s world, it is about shuttling the kids off to various sporting activities or getting across town the fastest way possible. And for that, we all could use a little help from our navigation device friends.