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Posted by Abbie
Badcock, 11/14/2007, Page 1 of 3
Will
personalized navigation services be the saviour of Nav and
LBS Industry?
With
a turbulent year of acquisitions, fierce PND competition and
substantial movements from web moguls Google and Yahoo!, 2007
heralds a paradigm shift in personalized service offerings
for navigation and LBS providers.
Industry
players need to take notice. Demands to provide personalized
services for consumers have fuelled the need for companies
to realign their navigation offerings and business models.
Telematics Update's Abbie Badcock caught
up with some industry visionaries to outline what delivery
strategies will be best placed to propel navigation to next
generation status.
In
a pre-conference interview for Navigation and Location 2007,
Vice President and Lead Auto Analyst, Thilo Koslowski
from Gartner highlighted the need for navigation companies
to turn two disruptive trends into market opportunities if
they want to ensure future success and market leadership.
These being:
- 1) Platform diversity
and the appearance of multifunctional devices
- 2) Transition from
device-based to service-centric navigation solutions
He
explains that “platform diversity views navigation more as
a service and expands the value proposition of navigation
solutions critical for creating compelling offerings in the
future.” Additionally, devices that feature a variety of applications
in addition to navigation will further increase "daily
relevance" for users and improve the overall utility
value of devices, such as cell phones.
This
therefore gives PND companies the opportunity to leverage
a device's display, processing, user interface and wireless
data technologies to enable a variety of services and content
options that leverage the device's internal (that is, hard
drive or flash) or off-board (that is, server-based) memory.
And
as GPS chipset costs continue to fall, more CE devices will
integrate location with connectivity to off-board services.
Thilo adds that “in such a scenario, the navigation service
will be at the center, and the actual device becomes secondary
in delivering the navigation experience.”
So,
speculation of which type of devices with dominate the market
is somewhat short sighted. As the benefits, features and functionalities
of locality and navigation take strong hold on consumers,
the device itself will be sidelined by the need to connect
to online and internet based location services.
Peter
Friedland, Analyst from the Soleil Group notes that
“ as wireless connectivity becomes increasingly available
for navigation applications more and more content will reside
off-board, either Internet-based or on a server.”
But
adds that “I still think devices will need some type of onboard
navigation capability and POI content as a failsafe for when
a customer is outside a WAN or WiFi coverage area. They can
connect to the web for Value Added Services but basic navigation
functionality still needs to be prevalent on the device.”
So
with the lines between on-board and off-board navigation functionality
blurring, what needs to be stored on the device and what doesn't?
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