Wellingborough - February 1, 2008 – The big names in the digital camera world are all at PMA from today and there is no doubt that GPS will be a hot topic amongst attendees. The reason for this is a host of recent announcements from GPS companies such as Air Semiconductors, SiRF, Qualcomm, u-blox, Glonav and Geotate (NXP Software’s spinoff). These companies are finally paving the way for intelligent integration of GPS in digital cameras.
All the major GPS IC companies are looking at the digital camera market because of the volumes involved (over 100million units shipped in 2006 and growing) and the interest that digital camera manufacturers are showing in the technology. These manufacturers have been looking at GPS technology for years now and they have all been facing the issue of the usage mode of digital cameras (click and go). This conflicts directly with GPS, which can require tens of seconds (or sometimes minutes) in order to get a location fix (TTFF).
As outlined in IMS Research’s report “The Worldwide Market for GPS/GNSS-enabled Portable Devices”, solving this conflict is a key element for a successful uptake of the technology in the market. Matia Grossi, author of the report, said “camera manufacturers are unsure of traditional solutions because they are too power hungry, too expensive and take too long to get a location fix. The imminent arrival of GPS-enabled cameraphones, has placed increased emphasis on addressing this capability. Furthermore in the past years their margins have thinned significantly, with the commoditization of their products and the competition from the cellular market, making the issue even more complicated. At the moment there are limited GPS-enabled solutions, mostly in the high-end SLR market using external (and expensive) devices”.
“A new wave of GPS techniques are emerging that will solve the issue in different and innovative ways. As a result, IMS Research’s forecasts that the GPS camera market will show very strong growth over the next 5 years growing from a sub-million unit market in 2006, with a CAGR of over 200%. Currently, two of the most interesting ones are those brought to the market by Geotate and Air Semiconductor.
Friday, February 01, 2008
100 Million GPS SmartPhones?
Thursday, January 31, 2008
GPS design changes cameraphone power consumption - 1% !!
New GPS Chip News - 1/100th the power requirements
This solution could make GPS an integrateable solution for just about any thing.... Now if it is accuracte to 2, 8, 16 meters?Air Semiconductor, a fabless GPS semiconductor company formed in May 2006, has announced today its first product, Airwave1, that deliver low power continuous GPS tracking in order to solve the time to first fix issue for non-connected consumer electronics devices. Air Semiconductor claims its Airwave-1 chip consumes “only 1% of power required by current GPS solutions”.
Garmin to build a GeoMobile Phone
Updated: Edited link, added info.
Garmin, maker of GPS products, announced a brand new product called the nuvifone. The nuvifone is a cell phone that resembles the iPhone and is loaded with applications and services from Google. It has HSDPA for 3G connectivity and uses a large touch screen for user input. Some of the services on the nuvifone are Google Local Search, Gmail and Maps with access to local traffic reports and Google Panaramio. One feature, called Where Am I?, automatically locates the device and displays coordinates, as well as lists the closest hospitals, police stations and gas stations. It has an MP3 player, shoots video and stills with automatic geotagging. It also has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and full GPS. No word on pricing or carrier support in the U.S. It will not be available until the third quarter.
I am going to ad links to this sort ast it devlopes..
From the handheld GPS side.. htttp://gpstracklog.typepad.com/gps_tracklog/
Monday, January 28, 2008
Several Intrresting Links
An interesting set of bookmarks...
My del.icio.us bookmarks for January 28th
These are my links for January 28th:
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Geotagging via CAN - Camera Area Network
A good article on Geotagging via camera area networking ...
except they left out solutions from Red Hen Systems.
NEW YORK (AP) -- To plan an upcoming hike in the Alps, John Higham scoured scores of photos plotted along his route on a digital map for clues to the steepness of trails and the availability of accommodations or camp sites.
These images were just like all the other vacation photos shared by travelers and amateur photographers, except they'd been tagged with location information in an emerging practice known as ''geotagging.''
Armed with such data, Higham didn't have to search endless combinations of keywords and guess how photographers would describe images in captions. By zooming in on the map, he could easily find geotagged photos along the Via Alpina and gain a fresh perspective.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Hitwise - Where your map requests really go...
Hitwise is an outfit that tracks what is going on on the Net. They can do particular research for you or in the case below do some work to illustrate important changes in patterns that likely will cause more specialized and private reseach to be conducted.
In the past four weeks. Google Maps received 19% of its search traffic from paid listings compared with 10% for MapQuest.
A year ago, MapQuest had more than five times (429%) more US visits than Google Maps. Last week, that gap was down to 126%. Google Maps is the #2 Maps website and attracted 22% of visits to Maps websites. Yahoo! Maps and MSN's Local Live stand 3rd and 4th.
Traffic to MapQuest has remained flat year on year and is down 20% in the past 6 months. Google Maps traffic is up 135% year on year and is up 7% in the past 6 months. The growth for Google Maps is from traffic from the Google search engine. The following chart shows the share of Google's own traffic that it sends to each of the top four Maps websites.
Google sends more of its own traffic to Google Maps than to Mapquest, a change that occurred last March. This can't really be attributed to an increase in consumers looking for Google Maps. We can measure this through Internet searches. Searches for "google maps" have increased but the term "mapquest" receives nearly 10x the search volume.
The change is that Google is sending more traffic to Google Maps for high volume generic terms and for variations on the MapQuest brand name. Google sent more traffic to Google Maps for searches for "maps" this year compared with the same week last year. The same is true for "driving directions", "map" and "directions" as well as variations on the MapQuest brand name including "mapquest driving directions" and "map quest".
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
Shifting StreetViews
This is a short story about this camera, Point Grey's Lady Bug II
versus this other camera, Doduca from IMC.
Or how IMC made millions by dealing Google out?
StreetViews immersive imagery as introduced on Google Maps is captured by stitching together five or more video camera feeds resulting in 360 degree moving panoramas termed as "immersive video". Immersive video prior to Google's interest was very much a niche media type and just another "wazzo-camera". Immersive video is a very cool digital product and its pioneers include iMOVE, Point Grey Research, and IMC or Immersive Media Company. And there are a number of new entrants coming along as well...
Links: iMOVE, Point Grey Research, IMC.
Google sometime in earily 2007 made a deal with the Canadian company known as IMC. Immersive Media Company has been pushing and trying to find a market place for a very complex immersive video camera they call a "do-de-ca" or dodecagon or dodecahedral spherical camera or 12 sided. But at 2.5 megapixels per frame and 30 frames a second, well it just didn't have that necessary internet snap. Further, IMC provided an exclusive license with Google to use their collection of immersive video for a number of US cities. I guess this sort of a deal could be called a loss lead as Google received content to kick-off Streetview and IMC got PR and a stock blip? Google announced Streetview around the 5th of July 2007.
"Trading of Immersive Media stock was halted the day the Streetview functionality was announced. This was to prepare for massive stock activity that the announcement of Immersive Media's licensing their image data to Google would generate. What instead we see from the stock price is a steep rise a week before the announcement followed by a brief peak and then a decline in stock price. I guess the insiders who bought up stock before the announcement managed to unload it all in a day or two." Artificial Intelligence and Robotics
Just ten days later, IMC continued to make hay on their "special" but mysterious deal with Google...
Calgary, Alberta, July 12, 2007 – "Immersive Media Corp. [TSX-V: IMC] (the "Company") announced today that it has closed its previously announced underwritten private-placement. The underwriters exercised their option to increase the size of the offering by 1,023,000 common shares, resulting in the issuance of 4,116,000 common shares at a price of $4.85 per share for aggregate gross proceeds of approximately $20 million. The net proceeds of the offering will be used by the Company for general working capital purposes. The common shares are subject to a hold period of four months from closing." IMC
As you can see from the stock chart above, even on the announcement of StreetViews and the increased interest in IMC, the stock just did not perform. Why? Apparently IMC had given Google exclusive access to its content but Google had no exclusive deal with IMC? They reserved other options on populating StreetView with content. Enter Point Grey Research and its Lady Bug spherical video solution...
The Ladybug®2 is the next generation of spherical digital video cameras from Point Grey Research. The system has six HD cameras that enable the system to collect video from more than 75% of the full sphere (lower blue sky index), and an IEEE-1394b interface that allows streaming to disk at 30fps.
With the Internet's excitement for StreetView, Google rapidly expanded its use of Point Grey Research's LadyBug cameras over IMC's "Dodeca-camera". Rumor was they could equip ten cars for the cost on one Dodeca camera without all the licensing strings IMC demanded. So the only way out was for IMC to terminate their once promising opportunity with Google... ouch!
October 1, 2007
GeoImmersive™ Google Imagery Content Licensing Agreement
ends on December 27, 2007
Calgary AB – October 1, 2007 – Immersive Media Corp. announces the termination of its content license agreement with Google Inc. effective December 27, 2007. Although IMC may experience some modest decreases in revenues in the short term as a result of the termination of the agreement, in the medium and long term, management of IMC does not anticipate that the termination of the agreement will have a material adverse effect on revenues.
But all is not lost for IMC. A most interesting comment appeared on December 28, 2007 from a stockholder that attended the recent Annual Stockholder Meeting for IMC...
The first half hour or so, was dry, dealing with election of directors and other typical business affairs. Once this was concluded, Myles McGovern took center stage and discussed every major transaction from the beginning of the year, to the end. Juices started to flow. Two graphs were presented and these caught the audience's attention, the first showing the share price run up to July or thereabouts. The second, the decline from July to Dec/07.
A pin could of been head, if one was dropped. This was what everyone came to hear. Why and what was going to be done. To no ones great surprise, the finger was pointed at the general market environment and the loss of the affiliation to Google..... Formerly and Frankly , I was quite disturbed by the slide of the share price but once I got my mind wrapped around tax loss selling and the direction of the company, I was quite relieved. Hammeron2 - an IMC Stockholder
(Microsoft used LadyBug to document Katrina's destruction of New g Orleans....)
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