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".

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

Walk On Dude!!

(Microsoft used LadyBug to document Katrina's destruction of New g Orleans....)

ABI Predicts 550 Million Handsets with GPS Features in2012

Key Drivers and Latest Trends Pushing GPS Penetration in CDMA, GSM and WCDMA HandsetsContact

Nicole Fabris
Contact PR
www.abiresearch.com

Shipments of GPS-enabled mobile phones will generate over $50 billion in revenues in 2008, rising to $100 billion in 2012. The market for these handsets is expected to grow from around 240 million units in 2008 to over 550 million handset shipments in 2012. At present, most current GPS-enabled handsets are CDMA devices, but increasing numbers of GPS-enabled handsets for 3G/WCDMA networks will start to appear in the market from 2008 onwards.

According to ABI Research industry analyst Shailendra Pandey, “The ongoing consolidation in the mobile industry – including Nokia’s acquisition of NAVTEQ, Broadcom’s acquisition of Global Locate, CSR’s acquisition of NordNav Technologies and Cambridge Positioning Systems, and the tussle between TomTom and Garmin to acquire Tele Atlas – gives a clear indication of the plans and commitment of industry players to address the GPS-enabled handset market.”

ABI Research believes that the mobile industry has reached the stage where we can expect to see rapid growth in the GPS-enabled handset market. From cost and technology perspectives, chipset manufacturers now have solutions in place that will allow the integration of GPS in handsets at low cost and provide significant improvements in terms of accuracy, time-to-first-fix, and reception in indoor environments. On the services side, mobile operators and navigation application developers are coming up with attractive LBS offerings. Also, handset vendors are showing greater interest not only in providing GPS-enabled handsets, but also in introducing their own GPS-centric applications and services.

ABI Research expects the market for GPS-enabled handsets to grow strongly in the next five years. In addition to major handset manufacturers such as Nokia, Motorola, RIM and Samsung, smaller Asian ODMs including HTC, Quanta and Inventec are also introducing GPS-enabled devices. The firm’s new study "GPS-Enabled Mobile Devices" examines the market landscape and future potential for GPS-enabled mobile phones. It discusses the critical business and marketing issues, as well as the market opportunities and challenges facing handset vendors, mobile operators, semiconductor vendors, and other industry players in addressing the GPS-enabled handset market.

IsWhere Quick Demo

Auto-tagging - Faces with Places

http://www.news.com/8301-13580_3-9816371-39.html

Get ready for a new era in which your camera knows not just when you took a picture but who's in it, too.

Many cameras today can detect the faces of those being photographed, which is handy for guiding the camera to set its exposure, focus, and color balance properly. But the more difficult challenge of face recognition is more useful after the photo has been taken.

That's because of a concept called autotagging, one of a number of technologies that make digital photography qualitatively different from the film photography of the past.

Tags of descriptive data can be attached to digital photos, and they help people find and organize pictures. The only problem is that tagging your photos, today a laborious manual task, is like eating your vegetables. It's good for you but a lot of people don't like it.

With autotagging, the camera attaches tags as the pictures are taken. Today, cameras embed timestamps in photos, which makes it possible to sift through pictures by date. But be honest here--how reliably can you remember exactly when you took that picture of your darling daughter a year or two ago that you'd like to e-mail to her grandparents? Being able to screen for photos only of a particular person could dramatically speed up the search process.

One camera maker willing to mention its interest in autotagging is Panasonic. "A lot of thought is going into how to tag photos so you can retrieve them at a moment's notice," said Alex Fried, national marketing manager for imaging at Panasonic's Consumer Electronics Co. But he wouldn't go into specifics: "There are things we have in the works that will help benefit consumers going forward."

And faces aren't the only aspect of autotagging that's likely to show up in cameras. Location, too, is another useful attribute that can be attached to photos through a process called geotagging. Geotagging can be used both to look for photos whose location you know and to figure out what exactly is in a photo you already have at hand.

Today, geotagging is generally a laborious manual task that requires geographic data to be merged with photos after the fact using a computer. But more power-efficient approaches will lead to in-camera GPS systems that will enable automatic geotagging, predicted Kanwar Chadha, founder of GPS chip designer SiRF Technology.

"A location stamp is much more important than a time stamp in most cases. A year down the road, you have no idea where those pictures were taken and no way to search for location," Chadha said.

iPhone Succes to Slow Smartphone Growth Rates?

Tecnology News - Nove 13, 2007

Slowing growth rates for smartphones already are apparent. In 2005, Windsor says, consumers bought some 50 million smartphones, more than double the number purchased in 2004. In 2006, unit sales doubled again to north of 100 million units. In 2007, he reckons sales will hit about 144 million -- still healthy growth, but nearly two-thirds off the preceding years' rates of growth. In 2008 and 2009, the rate of growth will slow even more, Windsor predicts.

David Carey, head of Portelligent, a consultancy that specializes in tearing down gadgets like wireless phones to estimate their materials costs, says the more likely cost driver in smartphones over time won't be graphics chips, but flash memory. "If you took all the memory out of an iPhone and compared its insides to a Nokia N95, you'd have roughly the same cost of components," he says "The component content that is most in demand is flash chips. If everyone starts chasing the iPhone, then the costs will go up, but that will be driven more by flash."

Indeed, smartphone makers already are boosting the amount of flash memory in their gadgets. Apple eliminated its 4-GB iPhone, to offer just the 8 GB version, and 8 GB versions of Nokia's N95 and N81 are expected this week. Within a year these same phones could be sporting 16 GB, Carey says.

Geotagging Driving GPS in Cameras and Mobiles

Geotagging Driving GPS in Cameras, Laptops, Says IMS Research
November 13, 2007

Traditionally, geo-tagging has been a complicated procedure, restricting the market to hardcore enthusiasts and professional users. However, new GPS and LBS advances are enabling this market while also driving consumer growth for GPS into cameras and laptops.

As analyzed in IMS Research’s report “The Worldwide Market for GPS/GNSS-enabled Portable Devices – 2007 edition” GPS is going to be integrated in a number of portable devices, such as laptops, PMPs, cellular and digital cameras. The overall market is set to increase 5-fold by 2011, with laptops and digital cameras representing over 20% of the market.

Matia Grossi, author of the report, says “Photo sites and online communities, e.g. Flickr and MySpace, need to maintain financial growth through traffic-based business; camera manufacturers need to differentiate in an increasingly competitive market; end users need new and innovative management functionalities for their offline pictures libraries. GPS is potentially the answer”.

“Looking at the camera market, only a small number of companies have introduced real-time GPS capabilities into their high-end SLRs”. It is difficult to integrate current GPS solutions cheaply and effectively. Camera manufacturers have razor thin profit margins, so it needs to be cheap and it needs to work. A traditional hardware solution is not well suited for the digital camera space for a number of reasons, including cost, battery drain and performance. Furthermore, people expect to capture the moment in an instant and do not want to wait for 30 seconds or more to get a fix. A GPS system, targeting the camera space, needs to address all these fundamental industry requirements”.

A new software approach is being developed by NXP Software targeting the laptop and digital camera market. SnapSpot is a low cost/low power alternative that easily integrates into these devices, requiring little additional hardware (i.e. antenna, LNA and RF front-end). When taking a photo, SnapSpot captures 100ms of digitized GPS signal and stores it in memory. On downloading the photos to a PC, the location is calculated using remote servers.

Asus has already introduced SnapSpot in its US3 laptops. Currently, other laptop and camera manufacturers have caught the navigation bug, which requires a more traditional GPS approach. This has driven the recent announcements from Qualcomm and other GPS suppliers in relation to these markets. While hardware GPS is fine for laptops, it will slow initial uptake in the camera market. IMS Research believes that software-based technologies will force manufacturers to change their minds and drive uptake of GPS and geo-tagging.