The Australian, Entrepreneur
AS was first the case with computers and mobile phones, it’s difficult to know where in the technology cycle to dive into global positioning systems.
GPS has only become popular in Australia in the past two years, with the sales value of GPS devices now overstepping digital music players.
There are about 1.5 million GPS devices in Australia. About 600,000 were sold in 2007, and over 1 million will be sold this year, says Adrian Tout, national sales manager at Sensis, one of the main GPS mapping providers.
Tout says that in the next two years GPS will become a lot more useful for business, with the introduction of SIM cards as well as interactivity through direct connections to the web.
Current GPS systems contain about 500,000 points of interest, with basic data including phone numbers, which can be dialled if a GPS device has a Bluetooth connection to a mobile phone. The plan is to enrich that data and include web surfing and access, for instance, to reviews of hotels and restaurants.
GPS devices already provide traffic data for Melbourne and by the end of the year this will be available for Sydney and Brisbane.
“The trick with this category is the content and as I’m talking to you today it is largely static. It’s not live,” Tout says. “Within the next 24 months you are going to see more dynamic content.
“We are going to have these devices carry SIM cards or right now they Bluetooth to your phone.”
Four GPS brands — Garmin, Mio, Navman and Tomtom — command 85 per cent of the market. They’ve come a long way from early GPS devices, which were over-engineered and hard to use.
The user interfaces have now been dumbed down, with large simple buttons that can be used easily in the car (although the best ones won’t work while on the move).
While mobile phones and PDAs (personal digital assistants) also now offer GPS, their screens and buttons are too fiddly for in the car.
Meanwhile, GPS devices are taking on phone features, at least linking them with Bluetooth, with some featuring 2-megapixel digital cameras that can take geolocated photos.
In fact, MIO (a sister company to NavMan) sells map-enabled phones and PDAs in addition to GPSs.
Both Navman and MIO GPSs can take pictures which can be used as navigation points, a feature useful for real estate agents and tradesmen.
Through their desktop applications, geolocated photos can be downloaded from the Flickr social networking photo site. Once on the GPS device, a user just has to press the photo and it will navigate to that point.
MIO marketing manager Daniel Antonello says that for business users the content now available on GPS devices is useful: “People can have their contacts on a GPS similar to a diary system on there.”
Perhaps most useful is the MIO C720T. Its digital camera acts as a business card scanner with text recognition and it can synchronise with contacts in Microsoft Outlook (but not for Macs).
Tomtom and Garmin (as well as GPS devices in BMW and Mercedes cars) allow the user to download the geotag data from Google Maps through its PC interface. Tomtom has also taken the first steps in interactivity with Mapshare. It allows users to update map data and share it with other members of the Tomtom community. For businesses it will allow them to share new locations — shops, for instance — with the Mapshare community before Sensis updates it records.
Tomtom is also working on bringing its “Add to TomTom” feature from Europe, where it is used by tourism organisations, to Australia.
It allows a business to create a data set of its locations, which can be shared among employees or even published on a website. The message is, if you are not sure that you are ready for GPS, it is best to wait. As with computer and mobile phones, the next generation will be better and cheaper.
MIO C720T
$549
The neatest feature of this all-singing, all-dancing device is that the digital camera can scan business cards directly into contacts, which synchronise with Microsoft Outlook. It can also play MP3s and videos. And it will navigate to “geo-located” pictures taken with its digital camera or downloaded from the Flickr photo-sharing site.
NavMan S90i
$599
At the top of the Navman range, the S90i allows the user to navigate to geo-coded pictures either taken with the inbuilt digital camera or downloaded from the Flickr photo-sharing site. Features of the desktop manager include mileage reporting.
Tomtom Go 720
$599
The top of the range Tomtom GPS allows users to download data from Google Maps. Data can be added and shared with the Tomtom community, and groups of buddies can be created, showing when they are nearby. The main difference between this device and the MIO and Navman products is that it doesn’t have a digital camera.