In the process of getting from one point on the map to another in a car, knowing where you are and how far you have yet to go is only part of the picture, as anyone who regularly drives a crowded urban roadway can tell you.
An accident, construction, or a ballgame at Shea Stadium can slow you down and make a mockery of the "expected time" for your trip. Yet reliable information about what's happening on the road isn't easy to come by, and it's especially hard to get in a timely manner. When you're stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, of course, it's way too late.
In-car navigation systems from companies such as Garmin (GRMN), Magellan, and TomTom all handle the point-to-point part pretty well and are increasingly able to give you some information about traffic conditions and weather through a variety of means. And then there's the local radio traffic report, which doesn't always cover the area you need to know about.
PROBLEM SOLVED? A new company called Dash Navigation based in Mountain View, Calif., is out to fix that problem with a new navigation device that will not only get you from one place to another, but will also help you route around tangled traffic conditions. Funded by Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, and Skymoon Ventures, Dash has been running in stealth mode for two years and will announce some of its plans today. It will also demonstrate its device at the DEMOfall Conference in San Diego on Sept. 26.
CEO Paul Lego says the device will do one thing that other devices on the market don't do: use the Internet to constantly update information about traffic and other conditions. "Because we have a device that can constantly connect to the Internet, we can do some very interesting things with it," he says.
He declined to say precisely how the device connects to the Internet, but there are only a few ways to do it in so mobile a fashion: One is the wireless data networks run by mobile phone companies such as Sprint (S), T-Mobile (DT), and Verizon Wireless, the joint venture of Verizon (VZ) and Vodafone (VOD). The other would be to use FM radio—or more precisely the FM subcarrier bands that Microsoft (MSFT) uses to send data to its SPOT (Smart Personal Object Technology) watches.
COMING TO A FUTURE NEAR YOU. Garmin, for instance, uses an FM subcarrier service operated by Clear Channel (CCU) to send traffic data for selected roadways to some of its higher-end navigation devices. In other cases, it can use XM Satellite Radio (XMSR) to send traffic and weather updates to devices.
Without saying exactly how the Dash device will work, Lego says the device can be constantly updated with new maps and traffic information that is fresher than that delivered by other devices. "The best information comes from someone who's five minutes ahead of you on the road you're driving," he says. "The second-best information is knowing what that road was like at the same time of day a week ago." He said he envisions a device that will include a data subscription service.
Dash's plans call for a phased introduction around the U.S. between now and mid-2007. It has 50 devices being used in a limited beta test around the San Francisco Bay Area, and that beta test will be expanding to 300 units. A consumer launch targeted in the Bay Area is expected in the first quarter of 2007, and nationwide availability is expected by the third quarter of 2007, he says.
GROWING MARKET. The company has 44 employees, all pulled from a list of established tech concerns. Lego's last job was CEO of Virage, an intelligent video software firm now owned by Autonomy. Before that, he was chief operating officer at Digidesign, now a unit of Avid (AVID). Other execs include Chief Operating Officer Robert Currie, formerly of Strangeberry, which is now a unit of TiVo (TIVO), and Marimba. Other execs hail from places as diverse as RealNetworks (RNWK) and General Electric (GE), to Logitech (LOGI) and Apple Computer (AAPL).
The company was originally founded by Mike Farmwald, founder of chip technology designer Rambus (RMBS), and his Skymoon Ventures kicked in $7 million in funding. Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital contributed $10 million between them.
It's a fortuitous time to be entering the auto-navigation business, especially in the U.S., where there are some 230 million cars on the road, but only 7% of which are equipped with navigation systems. Aside from the three best-known players, Garmin, TomTom, and Magellan, there several others already in the business, including Cobra Electronics (COBR). Recently Sony (SNE) and Philips Electronics (PHG) both said they would enter the fray.
Lego says there's plenty of room for a new company in that mix. "So far it's really been early adopters out there who have had these devices," he says. "But the size of the market is tripling and is only going to accelerate."
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