Friday, October 24. 2008

The Economy: What Happened When We Weren't Watching and the Implications for LBS

At the deCarta devCON conference, Jeff Rath of Canaccord Adams, an investment bank specializing in emerging markets, succinctly explained the current market bloodbath and what he forsees as the impact on the location-based services market.

Rath sees an unwinding of some of the macroeconomic dynamics for the first time in a long time. Leading up to this situation was a condition where inflation rates were trending lower and debt was cheap. This yielded an explosion of leverage and people bought a lot of things...much that they couldn't afford, and that is becoming unwound.

"Macro economic dynamics are driving everything; companies are posting good and bad results but all stocks are trading down," said Rath. For much of the early part of the decade, Canaccord Adams' Location Index, an index of publicly-traded location technology companies, outperformed the major market indices. In the last two years, that index has seen a huge decline where it now underperforms the market.

The hedge fund community is incredibly active in trading and represents 30-50% of the trading on any given day in the stock market. "Everyday you are hearing of hedge funds being liquidated en-mass," said Rath.

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deCarta Expands Geospatial Platform to Support LBS Developers and Mobile Device Makers

Kim Fennell, CEO of deCarta, said, "deCarta wants to provide the core geospatial platform technology so you don’t have to worry about it...We’ve evolved our technology to make it easier for app developers." In observing what he sees from his customer Fennell said, "Mobile operators and handset makers now want a common platform that supports multiple, integrated LBS applications. deCarta sees a need for a common platform from mobile operators and they are getting excited about this as the mobile industry involves.

deCarta just recently announced support for connected navigation devices or CNAVs. Real time two way (RTTW) connectivity enables access to dynamic content and internet search. Up-to-date content radically improves location look-up, gives user ability to query from the device while you are driving. With these devices, the consumer has the ability to look up company for which you don’t know the address, find it and route to it. "CNAV really changes the game...convergence is happening; and the ability to have a PND with a modem is the next iteration of the PND marketplace," said Fennell.  [Consumers] want content that is up-to-date and not content that is already two years old when it leaves the store."

Traffic: The New Killer App?

While at the deCarta devCON event today, I heard it said twice by deCarta executives that traffic was the new killer app. I guess I thought that traffic has been around for long enough that it certainly wasn't new and as far as a killer app, it is not a stand alone application and is merely now just included with most cellular nav services and will be soon with connected navigation devices (CNAVs). So, will traffic data, whether real-time or predictive, be a killer app?

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Thursday, October 23. 2008

deCarta Announces API for iPhone

At deCarta's devCON event, CEO Kim Fennell made an announcement that the company will release an API for the iPhone. It will be available for download by the end of October. This follows on the heals of deCarta's announcement that they released their J2ME API for mobile devices and support for connected navigation devices.

deCarta - Sitting Nicely with New Venture Funding

I spoke briefly with Kim Fennell, CEO and Marc Prioleau, VP Marketing of deCarta about their market growth during the devCON '08 event. They feel good that they took the $20 Million is new venture funding as the venture community may be looking a bit more closely at business plans that project revenues too far into the future given today's economic climate. The market for map servers is certainly shifting as Prioleau sees less of an emphasis in supporting web apps than other opportunities in the mobile space. He notes that Apple's App Store now counts 300 applications that are "location-enabled."