Predictive Mobile Navigation - Reloaded

Back in 2008 I touched on the concept of two-way personal navigation systems. Most navigation devices / applications today are still one - way. They receive GPS signals from satellites, and based on that compute the current location, rendering it based on locally stored map data. usually the story ends at this point.

Now consider what happens when all these millions GPS receivers can report their whereabouts on-line, real-time, to some servers in the Cloud. And calm down please you who cry "privacy violation" now. It is not about you personally. It is about statistics of the crowds. Just quantitative data. I do not care where exactly or how fast you drive. But knowing where and how fast how many people are moving (or standing still) means a lot. Simply means real time traffic data.

Of course we have had such systems for years now. Variants of the TMC (Traffic Message Channel, based on FM radio broadcast technology) are in service world-wide. But the are neither accurate, nor secure (due to poor authentication hackers can easily inject bogus TMC messages into the system), and require special FM receivers.

Today we have this strong teleputer trend - every mobile phone becomes a personal connected multi-purpose supercomputer, taking over functions of variety of dedicated devices. I have not seen the exact numbers but it is not a far stretch to assume there are as many people using their superphones as personal navigators, as people using dedicated personal navigators. And that ration tilts towards the superphones. By the way: have you noticed almost all new phones being released now are almost identical? I mean they entire surface is a giant high resolution touch display? This is what makes phone a superphone and places making voice calls somewhere down the priority list. The top of that list is occupied by applications. Web, music, messaging, social networking and... navigation.

When personal navigation moves from being a device to being an application on an always - connected personal superphone platform, suddenly there is an always-on TCP/IP communications channel at disposal. And there are servers happy to receive and crunch the location data sent over this channel. Inrix is probably the leader in this space, offering its real traffic data as a service to many service providers worldwide.

But real time is no longer satisfactory. What we want are forecasts. Triangle Software, the provider of the Beat The Traffic, has recently launched new consumer - oriented services. They have just announced iPhone and Blackberry (what about the Android?) applications available at http://beatthetraffic.mobi.

Of course traffic forecasting is just one application of two - way mobile navigation systems. There are many more, including dynamic, location - based social networks (where Aha Mobile is extending its lead), various alerting systems and - of course - targeted advertising ("You have been driving for three hours now, time for a rest, a highly recommended cafe is just 5 miles ahead...").

And by the way - speaking of mobile / targeted advertising - MNOs should offer a service like that: I give them a list of phone numbers (think: participants in my loyalty program) and a list of GPS coordinates (think: locations of my retail stores). Now every time somebody from the first list arrives in proximity of a location from the second list, they fire me an event, I can respond to. Usually by sending a personalized message. I know many companies willing to pay good money for such stream of events. Great example of a two - sided business model. Anybody?