Friday, March 28. 2008

Surius, XM and LBS

The New York Times Wheels blog offers insight into up and coming offerings from the mergeable satellite radio companies.

XM is touting its new NavWeather service. For an additional $3.99 a month, current weather information is correlated with drivers’ positions so that warnings about impending meteorological disasters are flashed on a navigation system’s screen and routes can be recalculated. One wonders how often such a feature might be useful (are tornadoes or hail storms common in your area?), but it’s an added hook that when tied to live traffic reports could make some drivers’ trips smoother.

Not to be outdone, next door at the Sirius booth the company was hawking its new Travel Link service, which is $6.99 a month. It doesn’t include weather warnings related to a driver’s route (just a standard weather report), but it does have several so-called location-based services, including local gas prices and movie listings en route. Travel Link will be available in 2009 Ford, Lincoln, and Mercury models.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in LBS at 08:17 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0) |

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The XM Navweather system is aided by a technology called ThreatMatrix by Barron Services, a Huntsville Alabama company that has a strong foothold in the weather radar systems market supplied to TV broadcasters to do similar types of predictive weather analysis. More details on ThreatMatrix can be found in this press release: http://www.baronservices.com/news_pdf/threat_matrix.pdf

#1 Joe Francica (Link) on 2008-03-28 09:26 (Reply)

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