Despite being the most popular and successful North American LBS application to date, generating a significant percentage of total LBS revenues, other opportunities exist beyond navigation, namely with location-enriched communications that leverage the inherent immediacy and presence power of the mobile network. T-Mobile US understands this...

While GPS enables traffic and navigation services, the core of the T-Mobile brand is about connecting our customers to the people who matter most.

TMo wants to

define and create experiences that enhance personal relationships and enrich all forms of personal communications, while also contributing to the value proposition of My Faves.

With the iPhone and Android there's a lot of focus now on location as an autonomous function and capability of the device, rendering the network to an irrelevant bit-pipe that has no role in the L part of LBS. That's certainly true for local search, navigation, publishing, and other device-centric Web applications, but TMo evidently knows that SIP-based immediacy in the network can be used in a way to add the "L" relevance back into the mix. Well done on them and werd up to my homey Tim Dunn.

Here's a prediction... 

2008 probably marks the death-knell of the standalone GPS navigator.

-Dan Jones, Site Editor, Unstrung

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.       

Aaron Katsman thinks P-Nav devices are "just another way that as a society we are getting lazier and dumber".  On average, most car drivers (on a daily basis) commute from home to work/school and back again.  Places frequented in between are etched into brains like a geointuition.  A box telling them it's there and how to get to it is like listening to a broken record of life - just like staring down the barrel of an electron from a TV.  Someone please reverse the brain-shrinking by making these systems more interactive with access to content that changes - geoviews published by interest groups, communities, and loved ones.   

-BloggingStocks 

Just because it's technically possible to do something from an engineering perspective, doesn't always mean that you should do it.  For example, TomTom's integration with Google Maps for POIs (be they expert edited or user generated) allows users to update their P-Navs with the freshest content via a save to GPS option in Google maps.  The data is then uploaded to the device via a desktop offline sync and then users are ready to go.  Sounds like the iTunes-iPod paradigm to me, and well, I think most acknowledge that works just fine for music content.  So why not maps? 

A connected PND with access to the Internet doesn't make it any better than an offline one.  In this particular argument, adding a chip to connect to the Internet means the user gets charged twice - once for the device and many many times more for the service - and that sucks.  I'll take the offline iTunes-iPod paradigm, thanks.   

MapmyIndia reversed the map data provider sell-out trend with a non-conformist move down the Navigation stack to maintain independence but still offer D2C Nav via a branded P-Nav device—the MapmyIndia Navigator manufactured by Delphi—a move that makes sense in an emerging market and when you "have more coverage and more detail than any other provider out there"

-Rohan Verma, CE Info Systems 

The last question of this morning's Garmin earnings call set the record straight with a priceless answer.  "You can call it fear, you can call it strategy.  We think our planned acquisition of Tele Atlas is inline with our corporate strategy."  Following that remark, Garmin, like Nokia-NAVTEQ before them, and TomTom-TA before them, again said the same thing - "the acquisition will not impact the open market conditions of supply to those who use our map data."  If that's true, then why does Garmin feel pressured to step up and counter TomTom's bid?!