Mobile Musings, Mostly

In my previous post, I touched on what I felt were the key differentiators of the DASH Express. This time, I will go through some trends in the PND and location market that impact DASH as also other PND players.

A hot, growing market, which the PND market is, is a good one to introduce a new product into. However, there are a few things worth noting about the current PND market in the US.

Incumbents : DASH is entering a US market dominated by the big three PND players - Garmin, TomTom, and Magellan. Together these three control more than 75% of the US market. And in a market in which retail consumers have seen the prices for PNDs drop to the sub $300 level over the past 24 months, market share can potentially be a good weapon for the incumbents to mess around with pesky new entrants. Add to this, a decidedly downer of an announcement from SiRF, a key provider of GPS chips which made Om Malik over at GigaOM to post Why the GPS Party is About to end. I am a big fan of Om’s, but don’t necessarily think the GPS party is ending anytime soon - some of my reasoning is based on the two points below.

Market structure : The hot growth of the PND market has attracted a whole host of formidable players into the broader location space. Nokia (throught its pending acquisition of NAVTEQ) and AOL(actually MapQuest, through its recent announcement with OnStar) are just two examples of the attention this market is getting. And then you have the impending TeleAtlas-TomTom and Nokia-NAVTEQ mergers as well - rapid consolidation in the space creating players with a lot of market power and deep pockets as well.

Multifunction vs specialized devices : With the precipitious declines in the average selling prices (ASPs) for GPS chips (by more than 50% in the past two years), GPS-enabled mobile devices (like the Nokia N95) will become more mainstream. Seeing the potential revenue stream in providing location-based services to subscribers, your friendly wireless carriers have gotten into the action too with offerings like VZ Navigator and Sprint Navigation.

Which makes you wonder … are the days of a specialized PND numbered ? Cellphones that are in addition to just voice communication devices, MP3 players and digital cameras, are a manifestation of this broader trend in the market towards multifunction, converged devices. I think Garmin is trying to hedge its bets in terms of the market adoption of multifunction devices (especially smartphones) with the announcement of the nuvifone - a cellphone+navigator combo with a 3.5 inch touchscreen (and built-in Google Local Search).

So, can DASH, innovative as it has been with its notion of the connected PND (which is pretty much what a Nokia N95 or the nuviFone offer) and attendant Web 2.0 capabilities, sustain itself in a rapidly changing market ?

Having raised upwards of $40million in funding, including marquee names like Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins, the DASH team could still pull it off. But the odds of hitting a home run in, what is essentially a consumer electronics game, are pretty slim - especially with the industry undergoing some pretty significant changes, and the state of the US economy (with implications on discretionary spend, which PNDs are).

What do you think ?

Almost five years in the making, DASH officially launched their first product (its actually a product and service combination) called DASH Express, marking the arrival of yet another entrant in the personal navigation device (PND) market - a space occupied by vendors like Garmin and TomTom.

So, besides the “standard” navigation (maps, turn-by-turn directions, etc) features, is there anything that is really different about DASH ?

To me, it boils down to three things - connectivity, Web 2.0, and desktop integration.

1. Connectivity : The DASH device comes with GPRS and WiFi connectivity, which allows for real-time (at least when you are in coverage) communication. Delivering real-time information to PNDs has been typically been via satellite radio (like XM) or through FM (using RDS-TMC) broadcasts. You could argue that given the sheer market muscle of cellular and WiFi, the connectivity infrastructure will have to move towards where DASH is pointing the way.

2. Web 2.0 : With the ability to connect to location-aware RSS feeds (like Mapicurious, Yelp, and Platial), the DASH Express allows you to search through these feeds for things like “ethiopian restaurants near me”. For those of you frustrated by how incomplete and out-of-date the POI information in your navigation system tends to be, this might be a way out. This feature is a small, yet, significant, step in making mashups truly ‘personal’ and tying it to one of the most significant dimensions of a user’s context - their location !!.Check out this interesting example of getting updated pricing for gasoline from the DASH blog.

3. Desktop integration : A DASH user can customize a bunch of options from a browser - e.g. the feeds you want delivered (see 2 above), frequently used searches (through Yahoo!Local), a list of your favorite “tapas places”. And these settings can be pushed out to your DASH Express device and optionally, to other DASH users that you can specify. Once DASH figures out voice-to-text as well, I can see how this becomes an extremely attractive feature.

Building on its connectivity the DASH device also sends anonymized speed and position data back to the DASH servers - this data is then combined with feeds from various sources (road sensors, commercial fleets, DOT data) to create a combined ‘bottoms-up’ picture of real-time traffic that is fed back to the invididual DASH devices. An interesting twist on crowdsourcing, this would not be possible without the bi-directional communication between the device and the DASH ‘cloud’. The traffic provider that DASH has partnered with, is INRIX.

In my next post, I will look at some of the challenges that DASH faces. If you are interested in a detailed product review, check out this excellent one from CNET.