Friday, January 06, 2006

Pondering Primate Diversifies His Pondering


One of my New Year's resolutions was to make The Pondering Primate more diversified in the stories I cover.

For close to 20 years, I have discovered disruptive/emerging technologies and the companies that will play a role in them.

Connecting the physical world, and everything associated with it, just happened to be the one when my blog was created.

BusinessWeek has a story about LoJack and the ramifications of GPS technology

GPS COMPETITION?
Rivals are racing to catch LoJack's lead. Ituran Location & Control Ltd. (ITRN ), an Israeli company with a similar tracking technology, made its debut on the New York Stock Exchange this fall.

For now, it doesn't plan a big presence in the U.S. market, but it's a player in South Korea and China -- important potential markets for LoJack. And auto companies continue to offer enhanced global positioning systems (GPS), such as General Motors Corp.'s (GM ) Onstar.

Analysts say it would be easy for a carmaker to tack a theft-recovery system right onto a GPS tracker, effectively beating LoJack to the punch. But Abely says that GPS trackers are prominently displayed on the car's console and use antennas. That makes GPS easy for a thief to defeat
Here's a perfect example of what I do. I knew GPS would provide other business applications and I found a couple companies that already offer this "OnStar" like application with a hidden GPS device.

Remote control/management thru the GPS device to shut off the engine or send alerts.

Think of the applications (homeland security, secured vehicles, hazardous materials, teenaged driver etc.)

I think this represents an enormous opportunity.

Is this the type of post you find of interest? Let me know.

This is what my company, Visionary Innovations does.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I came across research research by In-Stat http://www.instat.com/press.asp?ID=1505&sku=IN0502036MBD

In a few words the message is that wireless telemetry market is possibly bigger than wireless voice. One of the major problems that inhibit installation of wireless telemery solutions is high cost of telemetry devices.

No Name said...

Serge, I agree.

The dollars will be a lot bigger for wireless data apps than voice.

I have a list of all the players that will play a role in this.