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Sci Tech
Transcending geographic boundaries with GPS-based system
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Mating of the mobile with location sensing devices may launch the next big wave in personal appliances
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— PHOTO: ANAND PARTHASARATHY
Way to go: The first GPS enabled phone for pedestrians.
From the star of Bethlehem that guided the three Magi to the manger where Christ was born to John Denver’s soulful ballad which went, “Country road, lead me home!,” location sensing and guidance has remained high on our wish list of fervently sought-after technologies. But wishing does not always mean getting and navigation: celestial, maritime or personal, has remained a complex and often exacting science.
Not any more
Not any more, like that great equaliser, the Internet, global satellite based navigation epitomised by the GPS or global positioning system of 24 satellites, has emerged as one of those wonderful things mankind has created for itself, that transcend geographic and political boundaries.
GPS receivers have suddenly come within the reach of the average consumer thanks to exploding sales mostly to the car market, accompanied by significant technology advances that have shrunk core functions to single chip.
Local information
But receivers, no matter how compact, are useless unless the basic latitude-longitude fix provided by GPS is complemented by good cartography — geographic information systems that create the maps and populate them with local information.
This used to be an obstacle in India till recently: now government agencies have eased up on needless secrecy and are in fact monetising the considerable cartographic assets they have built up for nearly a 100 years.
The result
The result? Leading satellite navigation and GPS-fuelled players in India like MapMyIndia and SatNav have created considerable data bases of Indian route and city maps ... enough to make it worth their while for many new car buyers to shell out the Rs 15,000-20,000 extra asking price to install a vehicle-based satellite navigation system and a choice of city or road software.
Standard accessory
Both have tied up with GPS equipment makers to offer full fitments of hardware plus software. Rohan Verma, MapMyIndia’s marketing says General Motors in India had selected the company’s car solutions as standard accessory for all their high end car makes including Chevrolet, even as Managing Director Rakesh Verma was adjudged ‘World GPS Businessman of the Year 2007’ in a poll of peers conducted by a leading GPS industry web portal.
And SatNAV CEO Amit Prasad sees at the least a Rs 5 crore market annually in India fuelled not just by car fitments but by hand held devices and mobile phones.
The next big thing
Indeed, the marriage of GPS and cellular telephony seems poised to being the next big thing in personal information appliances. Both SatNav and MapMyIndia offer map-based location services and local landmark search packages that customers can use on their GPRS-driven (that is, Internet-ready) phones if they can connect to a GPS receiver via Bluetooth.
They can also opt to subscribe to GPS-based services that telecom providers like Airtel already offer their subscribers.
Phones which come equipped with a GPS receiver were a rarity, but that is changing very fast . The U.K.-based CSR which has a strong R&D team based in India has successfully integrated GPS with cellular technology to create the first single chip GPS solution for phones with embedded FM radio and Bluetooth and demonstrated the technology at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week.
Solution provider
SiRF, another GPS solutions provider with an India development base (the company was founded by Kanwar Chadha who is now Vice President, Marketing) almost simultaneously announced SiRF Prima a mobile GPS convergence platform supporting both WinCE and Linux operating platforms.
Interestingly SiRF’s mobile solution is compatible not just with GPS but with the new European Galileo system which just shows that satellite navigation is no longer tied to any one system.
On Monday, in Barcelona, mobile handset leader Nokia unveiled what is touted as the world’s first ‘pedestrian navigation device.’ The type 6210 Navigator phone is GPS enabled and also has an integrated compass system.
It will guide walkers, road by road, turn by turn, in all cities for which Nokia’s recent acquisition Navteq has map data.
Chip prices
A recent report by ABI Research says companies like CSR and SiRF have helped drive down GPS chip prices so that the cost of putting them in a cell phone is less than two dollars.
ABI Analyst Shailendra Pandey expects GPS in phones to grow from 140 million sets last year to 600 million sets by 2012.
Another report from IMS Research suggests that GPS will nicely complement digital cameras by helping fix the location of every photo taken — so putting GPS in camera phones will see a big wave of opportunity.
Pleasant voices
As Indians taste the early pleasures of pleasant voices guiding them down the narrow streets and gullies of their towns, they may wonder why they are having to pay almost one-third more for the technology, than what people pay in most other parts of the world.
Archaic laws
Archaic taxation laws still impose customs duties in excess of 30 per cent on GPS receivers, classifying them as navigation equipment.
Bizarrely even GPRS phones attracted this duty till quite recently till the industry pointed out the absurdity.
Sensitivity to the winds of technological change must characterise decisions of India’s finance ministry and one can only hope they will appreciate that automated, accurate, location information is something that customers will soon demand and expect as a right with their personal appliances.
The rest of the world clicks phone or GPS handheld to answer the age old question ‘where am I.’
We must not be the only nation whose people can still afford only one technology: ask the nearest dhaba walla.
ANAND PARTHASARATHY
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