Friday, August 28. 2009

Nuvifone Likely to run on AT&T in US

If you are still waiting patiently for Garmin's navphone, word is it'll be running on the AT&T network. Running the number suggest Garmin plans to sell between 300,000 and 700,000 units per year to raise $100 - $200 million pushing company revenues up some 6%. One million units is the norm for a "successful" smartphone in these times. Analysts expect Apple to sell 20 million this year.

- Business Insider

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Satellite Navigation at 08:25 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Thursday, August 27. 2009

TomTom, Garmin See Glass Half Full with PNDs

"In the summer period, we’ve seen quite a good development in demand. We’re becoming more optimistic."

- TomTom Chief Executive Officer Harold Goddijn

"We don’t believe that PND is dead. We think it’s going to continue to grow a couple more years through 2011 and possibly flatten out at that point as the GPS-enabled smart-phone market increases."

- Kevin Rauckman, chief financial officer of Garmin

TomTom already has an iPhone app, Garmin will not pursue one, but is offering its own branded nav phones.

- Bloomberg

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Satellite Navigation, Geospatial Business at 07:14 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Thursday, August 20. 2009

GPS Drawing Ten Years Later

The New York Times "Style" section hosts an article on the latest in what I know as GPS drawing - that is, navigating on earth so as to draw an interesting picture when the GPS captured route is viewed on a map. The term, created by Jeremy Wood is nearly a decade ago. He hosts gpsdrawing.com, where I first heard about the practice.

There are those who do it for fun, to raise money for charity and then there's this: "Last fall, researchers from the University of Arizona took members of the school’s nutrition club to a football field with GPS units to walk outlines of images with fitness and health-related themes — a carrot with a bushy top, a flexed bicep, a fish. As part of a $1.5 million grant from the Department of Agriculture, the researchers plan to use GPS drawing to help fight obesity by luring children into fitness with technology."

- Hat tip to reader Duane for the link

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Satellite Navigation, Health at 07:02 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0) |

Wednesday, August 19. 2009

Quote of the Week

"We’re trying to make TomTom navigational systems available to people across all platforms that are important to consumers."

- Tom Murray, TomTom's vice president of marketing development, quoted in the Wall Street Journal in reply to the question of if phone-based nav will replace stand alone devices.

TomTom is obeying one marketing guru's advice: Kill your cash cow. Or as I first heard it from Daniel Burrus (thanks Autodesk for having him speak at CadCamp back in the day!): "Render your cash cow obsolete before other do it for you." (Technotrends, 1993)

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Satellite Navigation at 06:09 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Monday, August 17. 2009

Garmin, others exploring acquisitions of Britain's Raymarine

Raymarine makes fishfinders, autopilots, marine radar and GPS systems for leisure boats and has been struggling of late. The company confirmed it is in preliminary talks with Garmin and others about an acquisition. The news popped after a report that Garmin had approached the company with a takeover bid on Sunday. Raymarine's stock was up 96% on the news.

- Reuters

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Satellite Navigation at 07:48 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

TomTom iPhone Apps Out - World Abuzz; TomTom Quiet

There were some 150 news articles about this weekend's roll out of the highly anticipated TomTom iPhone app in Australia, the UK and the U.S. The excitement is in part because this app unlike others, does not have a recurring monthly charge. In the U.S. it runs $100. TomTom has no mention of the app on its corporate website and its iPhone site was rather bare (with no link to the app in the App Store) as of 8:30 am EST. The video (advertisement) there still says "coming soon to the app store." This illustrates how corporate communications have changed!

For those interested here's Mashable's coverage with a video.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Satellite Navigation, Apple at 07:29 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0) |