Predictive Mobile Navigation

The vacation summer season is over again. I really enjoy traveling and it happens we do travel quite a bit by car in June-July-August season. Looking around it is hard to find a car without a portable navigation system these days. Some would say we have just passed the GPS revolution. But really? Surely having a nice map guidance in a car is a good thing. And as the roads are more and more crowded, electronic maps help detour traffic jams. Actually I use two devices together to make it through.

The first one is from the analog era - a CB radio. Extremely popular in Poland now, helps me learn what lurks before me. A traffic jam, a speed camera or a radar / laser equipped police officer hunting for a pray. Recently I was contemplating what would it take to recreate the CB Radio experience in the digital era we live in. An ad-hoc, peer-to-peer social network with alerts, chat rooms, where people you are connected with are selected on a location basis - the ones within a 10km range around you. We tried to approach this problem the "digital" way with one of our "digital" customers not long ago and we failed. Neither Facebook nor Google can do in digital domain what CB radio is doing in the old analog domain. Plus CB radios are not computers, so they cannot execute any code (read: virus) changing their behavior, so the huge security issue known from the Internet world does not simply exist. Plus the devices are so easy to operate. Turn on, select your chat room with a knob (a channel selector), set the volume and press a button when you want to send a message (speak to a microphone). Amazing...

The second is the Garmin GPS unit built in the dashboard of my Subaru. Subaru sells cars equipped with a big navigation screen but they do not have maps covering Poland, so the system would be completely useless, if not one smart guy in my local dealership - he managed to connect an off the shelf Garmin unit to the Subaru touch screen. The benefit of this experiment is the USB cable hanging under my dashboard. I can take any Garmin map software - be it City Navigator NT or City Navigator North America or GPMapa for very detailed coverage of Poland. Good electronic map is 95% of a GPS unit. The rest (device, its design graphics, gadgets) is just 5%. With poor map software and latest and greatest hardware you will get nowhere.

From the mobile navigation point of view, CB combined with GPS makes a system somehow similar to a GPS equipped with a Traffic Message Channel receiver, provided a TMC system is operational in the area you are traveling. But believe me, this all what people call "revolution" is just the beginning. We need one enabler to carry us to the new navigation revolution and it is the feedback channel.

A GPS unit knows a lot. Where you travel, how fast, your preferred types of routes (be it highways or off-road trails). It knows where you are and where you are heading (you punched in the destination address, didn't you?) and your via points. Imagine now what would be the collective knowledge of all the GPS navigation systems along the route you have just planned? Imagine a business intelligence database collecting all the statistics from every car on the move. And possibly every car that will be on the move tonight or tomorrow... with their preferences, destinations and via points. Such a system would be able to accurately predict where traffic jams will happen and SUGGEST to you taking an alternate route or alternate time... Two weeks ago a friend of mine covered the route from Gdansk to Krakow in 19 hours. Following her exactly 24 hours later I covered the same route in 8 hours.

Google already tries to do something in that direction, with the [Traffic] option on their maps.google.com service. Today what they have is only based on historical data. May be in the near future they will derive some information from the queries people enter on their web site. But this is just the infancy of what will come when the technology matures and gets widespread.

I do not believe we are able to get many new roads and highways anytime soon. And there are places we will never get them, as the areas (think: Paris or New York) are already saturated with road infrastructure. But I do believe there are many people who foolishly follow each other like Lemmings to the Sunday - afternoon "back home" traffic jams. They would really love to see the REAL predicted time of their journey based on how many others are planning to be on the same road at the same time. And many of them would choose to stay an hour or a day more to avoid all the hassle. Empty roads are a scarcity. Computing power and machine - to - machine communications are in abundance. We should utilize this abundance to improve the quality of our lives. Predictive Mobile Navigation will be just one of the future developments improving this quality. And this will be an important market. We love intelligent gadgets and we do not mind paying for them.