Personal Navigation: Quiet but a Big Deal

Garmin and TomTom will both ship over 10 million personal navigation devices this year, recent forecasts suggest. Total production in 2007 for just those two manufacturers is something on the order of 22 million units.

To put that in perspective, that's about half of the 55 million iPod music players Apple probably will sell in calendar 2007.

Location-based services seem to catching on very rapidly in the consumer space, after a long gestation in the commercial markets. Is it any wonder Google is so hot on location-based services, or the advertising and marketing opportunities that seem destined to come along with location awareness?

Nokia Navteq: a Service Provider?

Nokia is acquiring Navteq, a leading provider of digital map information for navigation systems and devices, Internet-based mapping applications, and government and business solutions. Navteq also owns Traffic.com, a Web service that provides traffic information and content to consumers. Navteq had 2006 revenues of $582 million and has approximately 3,000 employees located in 168 offices in 30 countries. Nokia is paying $8.1 billion.

By acquiring Navteq, Nokia will strengthen its location-based services and take a step away form being a device manufacturer and becoming an applications provider, at least in part. And why not? More and more of the value of any product are provided by the services wrapped around the device.

Nokia says it plans to use location capabilities to expand into areas such as entertainment and communities. In Japan, location services already are a fairly significantly used feature.