Many in the press saw and heard a presentation from Tele Atlas this week about how the company updates its data - now including TomTom satnav users' input via MapShare. Those updates now enters Tele Atlas Map Insight program and eventually can end up in the latest datasets. I only saw the slides as there were technical difficulties. But I don't think we were privy to this story Brady Forest tells at O'Reilly Radar that was shared by Patrick McDevitt's talk at the Web 2.0 Expo Europe.

Map Insight is a work in progress and hasn't always anticipated customer behavior. People like to play with their GPSs update features. Last December, right after Christmas, the Map Insight servers started receiving a large amount of block/unblock updates. It turns out people were blocking their street to confirm the feature worked and then correcting the data afterwards -- not realizing the confusion it was causing at the Tele Atlas headquarters.

Clearly, there's still lots to learn about crowdsourcing and human behavior. I suspect this holiday season the folks at Tele Atlas will be prepared for such antics. Alternatively, they might try to dissuade users from these activities, though I can't think of a simple way to do that.

Garmin's third quarter earnings of 87 cents a share on revenue of $870 million topped Wall Street expectations of 83 cents a share on revenue of $858 million. That's the good news, along with the location-enabled phone now on target for its delayed launch.

As for earnings, for 2008, Garmin is projecting of $3.78 a share on revenue of $3.6 billion dropping from Wall Street's expectations of $4.13 a share on revenue of $3.9 billion.

The longer the Nuvifone takes to get to market the longer Apple's iphone and the various Android and RIM solutions have to get out the kinks and corral developers.

- ZDnet
- press release on earnings

We explored the (connected) PND vs smarthphone vs connected car battle in today's podcast. Is it coincidence that today the price fell from the now-standard $300 to $200 for the day at Amazon? It probably is a coincidence, but as I noted in the podcast, the device's buzz went to just about zero lately. That means few people are collecting and sharing traffic data, one of the supposed big selling points. This device highlights one of the challenges of "barrier to entry" crowdsourcing.

- Engadget

deCarta announced its connected navigation platform last week. At the same time the expectations for portable navigation devices is looking dim as for-fee smartphone solutions for navigation appear to grow. What is the future for these devices and what about the connected car of the future? Our editors look at what the experts say and share their own predictions.

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Investor's Daily suggests two scenarios: a few more year of growth driven by lower prices, then death, or it's already dead.

Phones with navigation and other electronic goodies (e-book readers, music players, etc.) will grab consumer dollars. And what of the nav companies that try to fight back, like Garmin with the nuvifone? Jeff Evanson, an analyst at Dougherty & Co. calls it a bomb, noting it is ugly and late.

On the other hand, IBD notes in a second article that NIM and TeleNav are making good money from carriers by providing for fee navigation on phones. Noteworthy in the coverage: IBD notes that NIM and TeleNav get data from NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas (owners Nokia and TomTom are mentioned) but does not mention that the underlying navigation and mapping tools are from deCarta.

There's no question there's currently an abundance of location information out in the world. How do we "protect ourselves" from that very information and technologies? How much can we rely on automated systems to protect us from the dangers? How much must we do on our own? What types of protection do we not have that should be invented?

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