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COMMENT: Is mobile SatNav the new alarm clock?
ME staff Oct 13 2008, 10:34am
ME exec editor wonders how anyone's going to make money out of pedestrian navigation...
The idea of driving with SatNav is well-established now. Almost ubiquitous, in fact. And if Nokia has its way, pedestrian navigation will soon follow. But what about bicycle SatNav?
I ask the question from a position of some authority, as I used mobile GPS to drag myself and six friends around the outskirts of Birmingham last week.
For the benefit of readers from outside the UK, Birmingham is the most beautiful city in Europe. As part of the tour we even cycled past the deserted ruins of the Longbridge car factory. It rained.
As the designated tour organiser, I was a little nervous about getting lost on the way to Bridgnorth. But I needn’t have been. I suppose a proper mobile content journalist would have thought to use mobile GPS right from the off. But it didn’t occur to me until a few days before ‘le grand depart’. Happily my N95 worked like a dream, although I declined to mount it on my handlebars.
But the experience did remind me of my bafflement at the business model behind the whole mobile navigation thing.
Nokia paid $8bn for Navteq last year, but it already bundles maps and GPS without charge in its smartphones.
I realise that the long term plan will be for users to pay to download extras like city guides and overseas maps, but masses of local info is already supplied gratis. Nokia’s not the only vendor investing in GPS, of course. This week Sony Ericsson extended its deal with Wayfinder to put its Navigator app in future devices.
Having used mobile SatNav so exhaustively last weekend, I’m fully convinced the technology is a winner, and don’t doubt Berg Insight’s research, which says there could be 70 million handset navigation users by 2014.
But I come back to the revenue model. Perhaps that $8bn for Navteq was spent to provide another product differentiator for Nokia. Perhaps satnav will become something you don’t pay for, you just get free with mobile.
Perhaps SatNav is the new alarm clock.
