A significant portfolio of IP assets held by Delphi Technologies in Mapless GPS Navigation is up for auction.
Three US patents in mobile GPS Navigation Systems will be auctioned in Chicago on 23rd July by ICAP Ocean Tomo – a division of ICAP (IAP.L), the world’s premier interdealer broker.
This is just so interesting a news. With the current wave of experiments and bullishness of telecom industry on GPS based navigation, I’m sure there will be many keen eyes evaluating these patents for a potential acquisition.
An interesting thing that I see in one of these patents is about the integration of navigation with an entertainment device. This looks like a very neat concept. Primarily it has two great benefits associated with it
Freedom from an extra gadget.
Habit associated with the device to operate it.
Would be nice to see if any Indian company also participates in the auction. I wish, I had enough money to participate in the auction and perhaps acquiring one of these IP.
At the recently concluded NAVTEQ LBS Challenge in Las Vegas, I learnt that Taxi4me – a mobile taxi ordering service from T+1 solutions (an Estonian company) won the grand prize.
Pic credit - http://bit.ly/lAgv
Taxi4me helps consumers connect with trusted taxi companies. This mobile application will get you a trusted Taxi service for your desired trip. The expected time and destination is sent from a user’s mobile phone to a taxi brokering server. Local taxi companies then submit competitive bids and proposed routes back to the consumer.
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The idea at the outset seems to have potential. The emergence of various radio taxi / rent-a-car companies surely indicates that the need has risen manifolds in the recent times. However, it will be interesting to know what Indian users think about it.
If you have used a taxi service ever, what has been your experience about it?
Do you think you will use such a service for your taxi need?
How would you prefer to book a taxi the most?
Call
SMS
Internet
Anything other problem that this service still doesn’t address?
A list of 11 finalists is now public, RouteGuru doesn’t figure in the list but then those who figure, I feel proud to mention that two Indian innovations like Nano Ganesh and Green Phone have found a place in this global competition under two distinct categories i.e. Emerging Markets and Eco-Friendly respectively.
Calling All Innovators
Both the applications demonstrate pretty remarkable innovations, the Nano Ganesh though seems to be highly fascinating to me as a consumer service addressing the pains of rural population directly.
Shri Ganesh to Nano Ganesh
While chanting “Shri Ganesh” in Hindu mythology symbolizes for a safe and happy beginning, Nano Ganesh will symbolize for the safe and happy maintenance. Hmmm, perhaps one step ahead.
As the name doesn’t suggest, it is actually a modem (hardware device) that controls the starter of the pumpset and it just costs between 500 to 1700 INR. Just by making a simple mobile/ land line voice call, farmers can trigger their pumpset to switch it on/off, check the sufficient power supply etc. hence handling their pumpsets remotely.
I see three important aspects as the key to success in this innovation:
Voice control – More reliable than SMS and every person can do that.
Deployment of Ultra Low Cost Handset like Nokia 1100.
Pricing for Indian consumers i.e. starting from 560 to 1700 INR.
It’s an application for Symbian series 60 devices which allows you to save on your batter and charger’s life by providing you the alerts to several power consumption modules and enables you to shut down the unwanted applications to preserve power. Some of the main features are:
Backlight power saving
Charger Saving
Bluetooth time out
WLAN time out
The cool part here is that the notifications come as an SMS, which come from the application in the handset itself and hence doesn’t cost at all to the consumer. The pricing too is pretty competitive at $15.
It is indeed fascinating to see what potential simple voice calls and SMS hold for future. It would be interesting to know if someone reading this article has any interesting idea around Voice calls or SMS as well.
This month onwards I shall write for more than my personal blog as well. Thanks to Vandana Sharma – Senior Journalist at i.t. Magazine for showing faith and inviting me to write for the Magazine.
I think it is fun to pen down all those fragmented thoughts and ideas and see them taking a meaningful shape. When many others read it too, it gives even more pleasure.
This month I contributed my thoughts and knowledge around “Location Context Awareness” and how can it really make LBS meaningful. The article can be read below as a presentation.
India has 427 spoken languages and it stands 4th worldwide for maximum number of local languages.
I was pretty surprised to know some of the facts like:
Hindi is the 3rd most spoken language worldwide.
Bengali is 8th most spoken language worldwide.
Punjabi is 11th most spoken language worldwide.
While two of the Indian languages figure in the top 10 charts of the spoken languages worldwide, the interesting and surprising fact is that none of the Indian language figure in the top 10 charts of Internet languages.
Besides this, IAMAI also did a study which found out that total number of internet portals delivering the content in one of the Indian regional language looks to be very demotivating at just 1249.
Above table shows the breakup of the regional content portals across 8 major languages in India.
Language Patterns
While Hindi scored the highest; Tamil, Telugu and Bengali trailed behind by a huge gap.
Marathi has the least number of portals, while population-wise Mumbai is the third largest city in the world. Kannada is as bad as Marathi, being even the silicon valley of India.
Wondering if it is the technology constraint in these cities or that the English domination is much more here?
Category Patterns
Among all the categories, Map portals show the widest gap of delivering the vernacular content. Pretty much the time for GIS/ LBS industry to really think about the masses and get local in real sense; not just for the heck of saying it.
I think it is only Yahoo Maps that provide vernacular content for the Indian region today, while Microsoft and Google are far behind.
Wondering what Rediff, Indiatimes, Sify guys are actually doing in this space? Building their own expertise? If yes, it may be long for them to go vernacular in real sense in the Maps space.
Would love to see what Nokia India is really upto!
6th January 2009 – Quite a few product startups participated in the product forum launched by NASSCOM. Some of the representatives are Sachin Garg (Rawzor), Deepak Bhatia (Newgen), Luv Jain (GeoTrackers), Jaspreet Singh (Druvaa Soft), Arvind Jha (Movicotech), Dinesh Gupta (Busy Infotech), I myself and the elegant facilitators Sucharita Eashwar (Regional Director, NASSCOM) and Avinash Raghava (Manager, Northern region, NASSCOM).
An interesting pattern that emerged out in the panel is the un-conference style of discussion, complete two hours were consumed by the participant’s interesting introductions and the challenges that they are currently facing with their startup which never allowed Avinash or Sucharita to proceed with the presentation that they had. However, everyone including the facilitators seemed to like this unorganized attire and felt contended about it.
Every startup faces some challenges, so did everyone in the forum and shared their stories with all the welcoming gestures. While Rawzor team was confused about why few geographies on the earth gives him higher sales and not others, pricing strategy and making the enterprise consumer understand the merit of the product over others seemed herculean to Geotrackers, whereas scaling and marketing worries have kept RouteGuru team under the sun.
Another interesting point that the discussion revealed was how most entrepreneurs actually lacked strong marketing and perhaps fundamental understanding of marketing itself to reach out to the potential consumer base; hence emerged a need to hold workshops on marketing with the help of NASSCOM.
This is when the words of Mr. Dinesh echoed overwhelming to everyone present about how ‘Busy Infotech’ tackled the problem of increasing sales. While struggling to expand its reach in the SMB segment, Mr. Dinesh (and team) decided not to burn their hard-earned cash on advertising but utilize the benefit of mass gatherings in cities. Targeting the major exhibitions in different cities they occupied a stall to entangle with the consumers in an offline manner directly.
They perhaps understood the Indian psyche well and loudly sold a downgraded version of their software Rs. 99/-(This piece of advice came from the Mentors of the NASSCOM Mentorship Program) which became an instant crowd puller. They for one focused on acquiring these qualified interested user; then perhaps they knew how to turn them to a loyal customer for themselves.
He also shared an interesting insight on the purchasing behavior of consumers in different regions e.g. where Mumbaites invested 100 bucks without a hitch and din’t really care much, people in Kolkata ensured to see the product demo before they invest and even demanded the surplus rupee back. So you got to ensure a working product and even worth their every single penny, it doesn’t matter if you sell it for peanuts.
A few suggestions have been extended to NASSCOM to facilitate the inventors in the NCR region effectively. Looking at the energy of this discussion, seems like NCR innovators definitely have some good reason to make their presence felt at the next product forum meeting.
While every entry added great value to the last meeting, do you think you can add value to it next time?
While there is no first hand data available for India, there are survey results by AA (Automobile Association) members for US. The behavioral aspects of the consumers in that region, certainly reveal interesting facts when correlated with the habits of consumers and the geographical challenges in India.
The survey conducted with 7,380 drivers in November 2008 revealed:
1. Approx. 75% of respondent who have Sat Nav still carry a road atlas.
Isn’t it worth noting? This clearly outlines the fact that majority of the drivers fear that there is a possibility to get mislead by the Sat Nav (Personal Navigation Device or PND).
This is even important to note because the navigation and exit signs on road are very well marked in US and the addressing system is extremely systematic compared to the Indian scenario, where even most local residents may look confused in guiding you to your destination location, forget about the navigation device. We all know for one how badly does India suffer with the navigation planning where road names are not marked on the roads at all and the notion of exit signs doesn’t exist accept at a few places.
In essence, the promise of Sat Nav or the manufacturers to take you to your destination without getting lost is an absolute fallacy. In fact PND users have themselves communicated that these devices actually force you to go in a particular direction. They feel that it creates utter confusion and adds to the indecisiveness on-the-move and leads to higher chances of getting lost on the road.
Satellite Navigation Device
2. 30% of respondents confirmed that their Sat Nav has misguided them, 4% strongly agree that they are worried about getting misguided while 47% disagree that they are worried.
More than the majority i.e. 53% confirms to the explanationabove i.e. about being misguided by the PNDs in real-time and it wouldn’t be a surprise if this percentage is more than 90% in the Indian scenario. In fact, it would be a surprise to see the actual percentage of people who are being guided greatly by these devices.
3. 22% of respondents agree that their Sat Nav device sometimes distracts them when they are driving. 33% seemed confused about it.
Breaking of traffic rules, poor driving habits and lack of patience among drivers are not new things to any one who has driven on Indian roads.
Add to this the visual noise across cities due to unregulated/ corrupt adverting policies, the banners and hoarding are one of the major sources of distraction to these drivers.
Not to discount the fact of increasing mobile usage while driving among the drivers again.
Hence driving in India demands utmost focus, it is now very important to understand if there is really any room for additional distraction due to Sat Nav devices for the Indian drivers?
[Soon startups like CashUrDrive and Govt. initiatives allowing the advertising on moving vehicles will increase the reasons for distraction even more on the Indian roads.]
For the reasons above, I think the cost of device is not only in terms of hardware/software but also the cost of updating the maps/ data and the additional helplessness that they contribute to the driver on-the-move.
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However, there are other interesting insights about Sat Nav(s) that you might want to have a look at:
44% of the respondents use it very frequently. 54% belive it to tbe the best device for their car, 49% are worried that it might get stolen – Sheer love with their device, isn’t it?
18-24 age group is most likely to have Sat Nav (43%), while 25-34 age group is least likely to have Sat Nav (38%)
Men are more likely to own a Sat Nav (47%) than woman (30%).
And that the SatNav device is the most wanted gift item in the west.
______________________________
While I do not own a Sat Nav, after hearing the bad stories from the users, I do not even want to have one. It will however be interesting if someone has some good stories after using it in India.
You may have heard about VC/ PE funds, Angel funds, Seed funds, Ycombinator model funds etc. Have you ever heard about any Alpha fund?
Get ready to take your ideas off to an alpha stage with the entry in 2009.
Recently founded New York based consulting and advisory firm HermanBlackbook has introduced New Platforms fund to promote application developers to build interesting applications on top of platforms like Twitter, iPhone, Boxee, AppNexus, Trulia etc. for a minor equity stake in the company.
The interesting and not-so-interesting thing about this fund is the amount of investment. It will range only between $1-3000. While it may sound very interesting to some developers, some of them will sincerely throw away a laugh at it. However I still feel it as a Micro fund for ideas to reach the startup stage and anticipate the rise of such funds in India very soon too. VC wear offers $100 fund, read more.
It is indeed interesting to see dynamism and newer ways to utilize the money in the investor’s circle; a question that comes to my mind is what need does this small amount really solves for an application developer? Is it his Coffee/ beer/ pizza bills to attend Xcamps? or the electricity/ home rent for a month or the software license cost?
Though it shouldn’t ideally be software license cost because most programmers usually explore open source platforms for prototype anyways and also an idea should demonstrate the lesser cash burn per month before it creates twinkle in the eyes of at least an angel investor and thus to get selected.
I have never been to US (or Silicon Valley), hence do not really know the needs of the app developers in that region but for India I think this can be a rocking idea. A little modified version could be to invest in some of the killer startups hanging at the helm of death along with the advisory that newer startups like Morpheus Venture Partners bring. Arranging to invest such small amounts shouldn’t really be a big deal and works perfect in Indian scenario and hence they demonstrate their skin the game before talking about the stakes in the company.
Even more, India has a huge pool of risk-averse angel investors; they can certainly take bets with these smaller amounts. Big business houses like Reliance, MiH, Bennett & Coleman, Bharti etc. should also learn something from this. Actually I’m learning to respect his initiative more and more with the length of this post.
Here is what Darren Harmen (founder Herman Blackbook) blogged about this initiative.
Of course I’m aware of the challenges that lie ahead, still I may like to explore a little modified version of it in Indian geography when I’m capable of doing so.
Recently when I understood that Google tried literally hard to convince JustDial board for an acquisition but failed, it gave me immense pleasure. Not because Google failed or JustDial won or any such patriotic feeling but the fact that JustDial team visualized this almost a decade ago.
Nobody was accustomed to local search then but everyone knew that it’s gonna be the future. I feel exactly the same for GIS and the other LBS services which are yet to be seen in consumer domain. After all local search is one piece of the LBS itself.
There is this great conversation I captured which strengthened my belief even more about the potential of Location Based Services as the future applications.
In general I love the content created at StanfordUniversity and this video is an absolute testimony of that. Even more interesting is the fact that the LBS is a mystery to any big player in the world today and being part of such a revolution, that too being on the executing side of it, makes me feel even better.
To follow the conversation in the video, refer to the transcript below. I noted down it by myself to understand the every bit of the conversation, hence, there are chances for mistakes, please cooperate.
The greatest thing about LBS is that there’s strong value for both the potential consumers and for the businesses and technology people involved in it. The LBS by its nature is extremely personal and massive.
Q1. How big cell-phone based location networking be?
Sumit Agrawal (Sr. Product Manager, Google Mobile) – Huge, I think it will be as big as social networking. It will be part of most people’s social interactions with one another on several levels. It’s addictive to be able to track exact physical locations of each other. Various interesting use-cases will emerge when everybody has got the enabled devices which are passively, easily and seamlessly collecting various kinds of information about the user.
Cormac Conroy (VP Engineering, QCT Modem technology, Qualcomm) – We’ll have to be very careful about the privacy issues. People always have to have the ability to keep the information to themselves, if they choose.
But in general we found in technology, people are willing to trade-of privacy for convenience. At the end of the day, people will benefit from the openness of location based information.
Bob Iannucci (CTO, Nokia) – The carriers are struggling with this question, to what degree do they open an information and create together with all of us (us means various stake holders like data providers, device manufacturers etc.) a platform, that people can build interesting applications on.
While GPS is nice but today almost every cellphone has a cell ID and therefore is traceable to convert it to the rough GPS coordinates (if not very fine). And if you’re in an urban area, there’s value there. It will however be interesting to see carriers opening up the Cell-ID information and be part of this platform to allow us to build interesting applications.
Peter Frans Pauwels (CTO, TomTom) – It’s hard to get the carriers to open up, that’s a challenge. But there’s some good news on the horizon, with Galileo coming online. Nobody knows exactly when, but if it happens, we’ll have a huge consolation of satellite around earth, signal strength will go up, we’ll get much better coverage (also inddor), chipsets can be reduced, and power consumption can be reduced.
Bob Iannucci (CTO, Nokia) – Like many other parts of the electronic world that we have lived in for a long time, there is this tension between this general purpose device and fixed purpose device. And it’s almost always the case that the fixed purpose device can be carefully engineered and tuned for an application and it isn’t gonna go away just because I have a desktop computer, doesn’t mean that the computer is taking over the functionalities of the micro computers and rest of the appliances in the house. They’re there, there for a purpose. The PNDs have a role, it’s true that mobile phones, and it’s a fact that NOKIA sells more digital cameras than anybody else on the planet but that hasn’t put the digital camera makers out of business.
So as mobile phones become more and more location aware and more and more able to do nav, that doesn’t necessarily mean that nav doesn’t have a market and the dedicated nav devices go away for the same reason.
Sumit Agrawal (Sr. Product Manager, Google Mobile) – While there’s always going to be the need for the special purpose devices, whether it’s an iPhone or Blackberry whatever you have. Just being able to stick on your dashboard and get the real-time SMS rom your friend, which says, “hey we’re not meeting at XYZ bar but meeting at ABC bar”. You tap a button and get re-routed to that location.
Oh! you got to leave that bar because you got this agenda. This whole inter-relatedness of all the different services and applications that will exist in the cloud will far outstrip the fact that there will absolutely be some compromises with the user’s spread. May be it will fail, may be it will get me in the wrong place, hopefully it will not drive me through a lake but I’ll suffer a little bit with the inefficiencies on the edge of my device and still favor the amazing potential of the general-purpose nature of that cell-phone.
Posted by Piyush 
Posted by Piyush 
Posted by Piyush 
