1. Motorola's mobile unit is for sale
2. Garmin needs a big wireless play
   
3. Both are mid-west American companies
4. Both have market shares strongest in the US
5. Both have Magnificent Mile stores/direct-to-consumer strategies
   
6. Both share Nokia as an adversary
7. Both share Apple as an adversary
   
8. Garmin's offline, dedicated GPS business future is bleak
9. Motorola offers connectivity and carrier relationships that Garmin needs
   
10. Garmin's Nuviphone is not an experiment, like Garmin Mobile was

Nokia's global 3G GPS invasion has begun.  According to CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo

We expect to ship about 35 million GPS-enabled Nokia devices in 2008, which is equal to the entire GPS device market in 2007.

Our goal is to act less like a traditional manufacturer, and more like an Internet company.  Companies such as Apple, Google and Microsoft are not our traditional competitors, but they are major forces that must be reckoned with. Make no mistake: We are taking on these challenges seriously and aggressively.

The pending acquisition of NAVTEQ will allow us to more quickly realize the potential of combining navigation and maps with our devices. And we believe the potential here is huge. Particularly as we move from devices with simple navigation to more sophisticated location-based services, such as pedestrian navigation and targeted advertising.

We are very excited about the prospects for pedestrian navigation and other location-aware services. The market for location-based services promises to be the next big thing in mobility.  Navigation is just one of the services we are targeting. Last year, saw the launch of our Internet services brand, Ovi. Ovi is our gateway to such new services as Ovi Share, Nokia Maps, N-Gage games and the Nokia Music Store. You can expect a lot more activity here during 2008.

 -Reuters, Dow Jones

My old colleague Jamie Moss, an LBS long-timer who wrote the first European wireless location services studies back in the late 90s when we were both at The Strategis Group, has recently returned to the LBS beat, now over at ABI.  In his most recent work covering the GPS semi space, Moss predicts more technology consolidation, more acquisitions of smaller GPS outfits by other larger mainstream chip suppliers, and upwards of 1 billion GPS chips shipping by 2013 as prices per unit fall under $3.50. 

In exchange for Nokia N95's and $250, 100 University of California at Berkeley students have signed themselves up to become part of a human sensor network experiment for modeling Bay Area traffic.  According to project research director Alexandre Bayen, the Mobile Century experiment is "applying data assimilation algorithms to traffic flow models (hyperbolic first order conservation laws) to integrate measurements from cellular phones into the estimation of the velocity field on the highway. Applications include travel time prediction, estimation of traffic density and congestion and ramp metering."

-ZDNet

With speculations of the good ole days of dedicated GPS device glory coming to an end, and soon, TheStreet.com is reporting that Garmin has joined Apple, and the duo are working on a project code-named Bobcat.  The best at music + the best at GPS Nav.  Hmmm.  What could the next in-vehicle infotainment system look like?  

• Magellan Says "Me To" to TomTom with Google
• Garmin Says "Ditto" With Microsoft, but through FM Radio
• Here's 5 reason's Why Both are Wrong
• Garmin Dumps D2C Carrier-Sponsored Distribution Overheads
  
• High Sensitivity in Colorado
• NiM Does WiMax Because There's Nothing Left To Do
• Yahoo! Has Life!, Open's Mobile With Widgets, and Inks Global Data Deal with NT
• TA Still Trying Tired Contests, Launches 3D
• Goodyear Rubber Hits The Road
• SonyEricsson Leaves the Puck Behind
• Mio Is Two-Faced
  
• Sony Bakes in Skype and GPS to PSP
• Intel Wants to Put the Internet in Your Pocket, Qualcomm Knows That Card

With all the hubbub around openness - open networks, open business models, open sources of software, open platforms, and lots of open mouths about them all, I've come to the conclusion this is all more about a struggle over power and establishments than technology, with the decentralized under empowered gaining the strategic advantage and setting the tempo for conflict. There are thousands of coders out there always looking for the next opensource offering that holds the promise of disintermediating the established licensor's of royalty based bliss despised by those on the opposite side of the receiving end.   And the opposite side is good, really good at what they do because it's a shared mission, with a singular objective that can't be defeated.  Google knows this, and Android is the weapon.  Dash does to, and Openmoko is theirs... uh I mean ours. 

So I agree, and because I do, here's a quick survey...  How many of you would prefer to code with MicroEmulator over Java ME tools from Sun?  Answers will be taken quite seriously, and I will include the chosen in the next version of product.       

With the "growing popularity of US dognapping of rare and expensive breeds of dogs" in the US, according to Russian sources, President Vladimir Putin is ampd about a GLONASS dog-tracking module scheduled for release in '08.  He plans to use it to keep track of his pet Labrador, Connie, who is purportedly named after Condoleezza Rice.  Maybe something got lost in translation with this one...

-Russian News and Information Agency

Lowest common denominator semi segment M&A activity is rounding out the year for LBS acquisitions, the latest arriving today from NXP (i.e. Philips Semiconductor) as the winner of GloNav's GPS silicon.  This one arrives following last week's news of Atheros Communications, Inc. gobbling up u-Nav Microelectronics, with SiRF-Centrality before that, and 2007's loudest Broadcom-Global Locate firecracker back in June.   It seems that as the LBS industry gets larger, we are getting smaller care-of more mainstream provider assimilation..