Thursday, November 16. 2006

TAPC - What's next for Wireless Consumers?

This panel addressed that big question in the context of navigation. First off, we saw some video from focus groups in Washington DC of somewhat savvy users of wireless devices:

When you think of new technology, what do you think of?
Smaller
Intimidated
Convenience
Speed
Communication
Access to goods/service/information
Decision making
Wireless
Digital
Self explanatory products
Wikis/blogs

How do you navigate?
MapQuest/Yahoo for my daughter/wife
My colleagues can't follow directions; they must follow someone
East/north are not east/north
People swear by GPS (used to use ADC maps)

Key features in next GPS purchase?
One with road conditions, but I like the one I have, especially for night
Increase integration capability/Bluetooth/live updates

Knowledge of Wireless GPS Providers?
Five didn't know about it.
Nextel TelNav hard to use.

Wireless feature wishlist?
More than I need now! (camera, Internet, text, etc.)
GPS would be nice and text messaging
I'd like GPS part to be useful
GPS
E-mail
GPS

After a test drive with PNAV
Still not user friendly (better than phone one)

Willingness to pay?
$5 - all
$10 - half
50 cents/per - all

From the moderator - key takeaways
(1) they were interested
(2) thought it was ok to pay
(3) community interest (wikis)
(4) conversational directions (left at McDonald's)

Questions to the panel:

What can your company offer to address their requests?

Got be easy to get to and then use. Should be taken for granted. From there, very appealing/easy to use. Need to see it as more than a nav application - it's part search, too.
- Kim Fennel, deCarta

Education. Folks don't know this stuff exists. And discoverability. We need to understand limitations of the platform and work with them in mind.
- Alan Beiagi, MapQuest Wireless

We need to drive handset folks to make it easier to find. Should be like an iPod. We need to push of app providers to improve the interface. Give me relevant content -
- Steve Myers, Sprint

Mobile is not a desktop. We need to get developers to use it "real time" while driving, with kids bugging them, etc. Bar is it should be intuitive. We'll need to figure it out, just like we did with e-mail. Sharing/collaboration of content will drive use.
- Jess Boudreau, RIM

Working with our partners, need to educate consumers.
Dave Hildebrant, Cingular

If you could add one feature... what would it be?

Voice recognition
- Sprint

Better sharing of information. Tracking your buddies. Tracking your lost phone. Get me close to where I'm going. Tell me the name of the next street; the sign is blocked.
- RIM

GPS chips in GSM phones.
- deCarta

Big leap?

If I had it I wouldn't be here!
- Sprint

Great traffic information. Predictive based on history, all roads, etc. So long as its accurate and it really works. Consumers are quick to be "turned off."
- deCarta

Drive my car. Make the stuff we have actually work! Mobile brings a lot to the table, but still have issues. Data updates, for example.
- RIM

This stuff was supposed to happen six years ago!
- MapQuest Mobile

Single user experience across all platforms. Level of customization (SMS on traffic for home turf vs. full navigation for out of town).
- Cingular

What the evolution of a location standard for data sharing?

Ideally it will be collaborative. Not a choice, a matter of time.
- RIM

Market will drive it. Maybe not nav industry, but social networking may do it.
- deCarta

We look to the developers to spread that innovation. We need to leverage every platform.
- Cingular

We standardized our APIs. We are looking for the killer social networking app to take hold.
- Sprint

How are people going to pay for these types of apps?

Most are subscriptions. We are looking at pay per use. I don't think that'll last - nav will be integrated into other apps like search. Will ads fly? We don't know. We don't know the price to feature value proposition.
- Sprint

Driven by model that drives content to each part of the value chain. Now it's MRC. Mostly advertising for now. Paradigms that work on the Web won't work on mobiles. Something will evolve.
- MapQuest Mobile

We need to educate and get critical mass. Could be pay per view - if I'm lost I'll use it! (How lost are you? $3 lost? $5 lost?) We need to be careful not to turn folks off.
- RIM

Some form of ads/coupons/search may defray the cost.
- deCarta

A lot of success when get a month free. If they use it three times, generally will buy it.
- Cingular

I learned on new term at this panel: LBS Ecosystem. I understand that to mean all of the folks in the value chain - carriers, applicatoin providers, platform folks, data providers, etc. Here's a use example: the entire LBS ecosystem is responsible for educating the market about the availability of wireless navigation systems.

TAPC - Community Mapping Panel

Brad Forrest of O'Reilly moderated a panel of Internet mapping type companies about community created content.

User Role

The role will vary based on the end-user and application, based on "tolerance." So one way is in partnership with a "trusted source," like Tele Atlas. Another is for users to give us content, those are places that accuracy is not such a big deal (say a Starbucks vs. an exit on a highway).
- Al Cooley, TA

We want to try to be all things to all people and try to address input as broadly as possible.
- Howard Steinberg, Ask.com

Feeback should be an ordinary part of the user experience. Was the map right? Wrong? That information goes back to data providers. The user's role should also be in creating the personalized content needed, including things like upload photos.
- Christian Dwyer, MapQuest

The users role should be whatever the user wants it to be. When they give us data (say via Flickr) we need to be good users/mantainers/aggregators of it.
- Mark Law, Yahoo!

User content is king, since it's what makes a personalized experience possible. Sharing one's location is the most personal information. Women in general are less likely to want to share locations, but men want to know where everyone is.
- Sean Murphy, TCS

Who owns user uploaded data?

Each customer (say AAA) owns the relationship with end user.
- TCS

No one wants to read the license, so we tie it to the log in. Folks are more responsible when it's not anonymous. On Flickr Yahoo! can do what it wants, but copyright is shared between user and Yahoo!
- Yahoo!

It's a permissions based approach. The user should have the option to share or not. It should be tied to an ID.
- Mapquest

Users are becoming more savvy and want to participate in making the experience better for all. The more you put in, the more you'll get out.
Ask.com

Everything is very transparent; some of our community programs are open about that you are sharing with everyone.
- Tele Atlas

Mashups as feedback? What are you seeing?

Helping educate the public on what's possible with location. And, highlights the need for personalization.
- TA

Opening APIs is very important. They want easy to use APIs that are easy to annotate. Some are relevant to a few folks others to larger communities.
- MapQuest

We have lots of APIs, but also some "building blocks" to make it easier. Now with Flash API - can put maps in movies, 3D visualization, etc. What we learning from developers: they want more data available, more data publishing, ability to share data beyond the mashup (an index of geo content), an aggregate API (for Flickr, Map API, Local API, etc.).
- Yahoo!

Our customers want to aggregate all kinds of data on maps, that is, put all the feeds on the map. They want us to aggregate those into a single feed they can use.
- TCS


When will location automatically be in Web Map portals

Soon/it's already here. We post that on our Yahoo! Messenger. (I’m at xxx.) We need to figure out how to use/not use it. Europe is pretty ok with sharing locations; other places like SE Asia it's not as acceptable.
- Yahoo!

What's the benefit of Yahoo! of the APIs?

We talk about that all the time! Two faces: everyone is doing it, so we need to and the innovations are beyond what we can't do due to resources. Monetization is a challenge. Do we add ads? Total transactions cost vs. consumer sites, is small.
- Yahoo!

Cost is not as expensive as marketing would be for commercial services.
- MapQuest

PR, free R&D, inspiration, recruiting tool
- Brady Forrest

TAPC - TomTom and the Future

Jocelyn Vigreux, of TomTom highlighted that "To TomTom" is now in the Dutch dictionary. That shows that navigation, and certainly TomTom, have "made it." His discussion however seemed a bit defensive to me. He agreed that maps would be on all phones, but that there was still quite a long time for a market for in-car navigation systems.

The future, he argues is about content, specifically traffic content. We've underdelivered he suggests; we don't yet have real time, all roads, 24x7, predictive and reliable traffic information. (Recall: NAVTEQ just recently announced the acquisition of Traffic.com). The future is also about personalization, again that intimate relation to the mobile device.

Update:The folks from TomTom suggested to me after reading this that the the goal was not be defensive, but to say how the two solutions in car nav and mobile nav will work together, but at different times for different purposes. The company feels that for some years the two will coexist, afterward? Who knows. I also learned that TomTom offers a phone-based solution.

TAPC - Nokia's location-based experiences

Ralph Kunz is vice president of multimedia experiences at Nokia. He focused on what the company calls "location-based experiences." In the past those experiences included Web mapping (MapQuest) or in-car navigation tools (TomTom). Now that experience is moving to mobile devices which are location aware and connected. And the market is changing because of that.

Why? Mapping routing users are expected to grow to about 20 million in 2006. But Nokia expects to sell some 300 million Nokia phones. So, if they (and others) get mapping into phones that expands the location-based experience market from niche to mass.

Why is the market ready now after the failure in the late 1990s? In part, he argued, because personal navigation devices allow you to take maps anywhere you want. And, that's a big thing to learn. It was learned from something similar: iPods. iPods convinced us about music everywhere; now it's time for location information everywhere.

He noted too, strangely echoing a hall conversation I had before the session, that the search paradigm is now in end user minds. It follows the move from directory use on the Internet (remember my first GIS writing job? I wrote a GIS directory!) to search on Internet.

He cited tech enablers including cheaper GPS chips, lower power consumption, etc. and cited that 3G is not required for these experiences. It's also ready because users want and vendors can provide mapping/routing apps that are connected to other data and applicatoins on mobile devices. That is, you can get to a map from other "places" on the device, say from a search from contacts database.

Nokia's new offering - smart2go (which works on GPS-enabled or not-enabled devices) will include a desktop tool (think iTunes for downloading data,
accessories (to plug it into cars, etc. and will include a free downloadable client with free mapping.

The business model will be to turn that free platform, into money. It will be monetized by upselling to fancier (traffic, turn by turn) services. The mobile devices, he imagines will plug into a car's speakers, screen from car just like a laptop plugs into a full sized keyboard, mouse, monitor.

The future he concludes is not one of navigation, but of location experiences, of what some would call LBS or what we at Directions might call location intelligence.

TAPC - Tele Atlas Trivia

George Fink, Tele Atlas COO, introduced three executives who played "Tele Atlas Trivia" to help share some of the numbers and successes in the past years. Here are some answers and questions:

60% of total revenue, $180m - How much investment goes into global database quality enhancements (about 400,000 bytes per day in Europe/USA)?

More than 250 million American citizens - Who does TA's data protect? That is 90% of E911 calls depend on TA data.

Tele Atlas partner who supports Blackberry's worldwide - Who is Research in Motion (RIM)?

20 million POIs, 680 million addresses, 3D display - What claim only TA can claim?

Data collection 5x faster with higher QA - How do TA customers benefit from the $100,00 orange vans?

Simultaneous delivery of MuliNet (core navigation/LBS database) in 51 countries - What is a first for TA?

TAPC - From Guide to Find

Alain De Taeye, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer explained the key "sea change" the company (and frankly good parts of the geospatial technology market) are seeing. The move from "guide" to "find." Mapquest (and others) made their mark by getting us, in our cars, from A to B. Now, we want more, we want to find. I have to point to the Internet and search engines to helping educate us on the matter. What are the implications of this change? New demands including:

(1) Increased expectation from technology - not just guide, but find and we don't know what!

(2) Ease of use - demand not a map but virtual reality, demand ease of input of query, input of their data, integration with apps.

(3) More content - link "everything" to map, dynamic (traffic/weather), specific community-based content

(4) Increased coverage - from car to everyone with phone is part of the addressable market, car countries are not the only ones

(5) Quality expectation - ideally want error free map, but that's not possible, but we aim for mid 90s, ideally want fresh and up-to-date, again not possible, but can be quicker

The end consumer is driving the market now, far more than businesses, etc. That's true in part because the market is now 10 or 100 times larger than the auto market, it's now everyone with a phone or wireless device.