PND Market To See Early Christmas

From the NAVTEQ Connections conference in San Francisco…NAVTEQ executive VP Jeff Mize revealed some stats about the coming consumer portable navigation device market at Christmas time:
PND Market Growth: The PND is showing strong growth: 20 million units will be sold this year; an 80% growth over last year. 60% of these 20 million units will be priced at less than $200; 90% will be sold from only four manufacturers (Garmin, TomTom have most market share). There is now a very diverse distribution model with PNDs sold in over 35000 retail outlets.

PND market dynamics: Expect aggressive pricing on Black Friday. There will be more emphasis on accessories and add-ons such as map updates, both downloadable and in store, plus text to speech will be a big deal.  Watch for the introduction of private label retailer brands as well as a buzz around connected devices.

NAVTEQ Going Forward

From the NAVTEQ Connections conference in San Francisco…

I heard Jeff Mize, a NAVTEQ executive VP comment on a vision I hadn’t heard articulated before…that is that NAVTEQ is viewing themselves as much more than just a provider of navigable (read: highest quality) street centerline data and a few dynamic data sets like traffic or fuel prices. Mize indicated that much more in the way of POIs are coming such as bus schedules, flight status, and pedestrian pathways. NAVTEQ wants to provide as much information for "off-board" navigation as possible and do it on any the map base. Their new location content managment system is intended to provide POI data regardless of the underlying navigation database.

Kudos: Valerie Hastings, Village of Plainfield, IL

I’m reading between the lines here, but it’s my hunch Ms. Hastings, GIS Manager in Plainfield is behind something important: the village submitted address information to both Tele Atlas and NAVTEQ after calls from residents concerned their addresses were not found in online maps and sat nav devices. Not only that, but the article in the local paper lists all the places those who are still unhappy can go to provide corrections.

I’ve read too many articles that “complain” about errors and don’t follow through with any sort of action or suggestions for residents to take action. So, kudos to Ms. Hastings.

- Suburban Chicago News

Clever marketing from “Navtec”

I was minding my own business doing some news searches this morning when a sponsored ad appeared next to my Google search.

Navtec? That’s not how you spell it! It’s now NAVTEQ but back in the day was NAVTECH. Must be some scammer playing on the name to get folks to buy their… Ooops. The link takes one to navigation.com, the URL NAVTEQ has for its map update store.

I’m so naive.

GPS Impacts to the Portable Device Market: An Update

I attended a webinar today conducted by Park Associates on how GPS is influencing the portable device market and specifically the personal navigation device (PND) market. As we are constantly being asked how big any particular segment of the geospatial and LBS martkets are, I wanted to share some of their insights with you:

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