Podcast: Why is the geospatial marketplace so difficult to measure?

This week editors Adena Schutzberg and Joe Francica tackle a question and why it’s so hard to answer. The question is: How big is the geospatial market or a part of it? That’s often followed by: Who has the definitive numbers on how much money is to made and how many users and potential users are out there? They take a look at some resources and tease out why definitive numbers are so difficult to acquire.

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Real-Time Two Way Communication More than DoubleSpeak

I had to read the press release more than once to make sense of ABI Research’s latest prognostications about the growth of the LBS market and its use of "real-time two-way" (RTTW) communication for navigation systems. Boiled down to simple terms, RTTW means having two communication system on one device. The first might be the GPS receiver to support navigation; the second a celluar radio to receive traffic information. Regardless of the form, the result is predicted to be explosive growth. From the release, "Handset-based navigation, where the navigation processing is conducted off-board (not on the handset) is one form of RTTW connected navigation, and it will experience explosive growth. Off-board navigation will go from under half a million users worldwide at the end of 2006 to more than 70 million at the end of 2012."

How Many Phones are “navigation ready?” It’s a big number

In this week’s issue of Business Week, the magazine reports that;the number of navigation-ready cell phones will hit 162 million this year, or more than seven times the number of such devices sold for use in cars or other nonphone gadgets, says researcher iSuppli." We posted a recent information from Networks in Motion (NIM) that indicated that of the $118 million in sales of downloaded mobile applications, 58% were for LBS apps in Q2 or $68 million. The Business Week article notes that LBS apps accounted for $92 million in Q3 and my sources tell me that Q4 will blow those numbers away.