$71m funding, "Dash Navigation finally released Dash Express, a two-way Internet-connected dashboard traffic gadget that brings a kind of social network to the highways."
Seriously?.. An internet connected social network in the car. O...k... $71 million?
From their website - "offers a wide range of new capabilities available from the car that makes a typical GPS practically obsolete."
Sure, I'll throw my lousy GPS away and buy a "social network enabled" one! For $10 a month, I'm sure it's worth it...
I played with a Dash GPS for a week here in Cupertino. It's really awesome and I'm already trying to sell my Garmin Nuvi to switch to the Dash.
As for your complaints:
Social network for the highways is reporter-speak. What the Dash does is it consolidates traffic data from all the users, analyze it, and then pushes back to the users. So if car A slows down or stops because he encounters a traffic jam that data is sent out to other cars behind car A to inform them of such a problem. It then redirects them to another route as a means of saving you time. If you don't think that's freakin' awesome, well then I don't know, you must live on the moon.
Also hardware companies have a considerably higher overhead than web 2.0 companies considering the amount of R&D and manufacturing costs associated with releasing a, you know, actual product.
Yeah, let me know when Garmin or Tomtom have it. Also let me know when they're going to release it for free. Considering that they charge $100 each year for the map updates, I highly doubt it would be cheap.
The UI for the Dash is also considerably better than Garmin, which is also considerably better than Tomtom. As it stands by itself, the Dash is a pretty darn good GPS unit.
Also, as for the iPhone competing with it. Maybe, but we made it kind of hard to position it that way.
Okay I guess we'll have to delve into a GPS review:
TomTom made an announcement with Vodafone back in 06. Nothing's come out of that. You still need a traffic receiver attached to your unit to get data over the air or you need to plug the unit in to your computer with the Internet to share your map corrections. Dash does this in real time over the air.
As for 10 dollars a month: well no one pointed a gun at your head. I find the product more valuable than 10 bucks a month and I'm willing to pay. My yearly Garmin map updates would have been 80 bucks or so anyways without the added benefits.
It parses the data intelligently by including actual traffic info from other sources. As more users get connected it's more accurate at determining deadlocks without the aid of other sources.
Also, wouldn't it be awesome for it to know where I am at the side of the read and beam that info to AAA?
The article seemed a little misguided at what a social network is. I think the idea has awesome potential - think about a live display that has all the information you could gather if all the vehicles on the road were equipped with dash. You could come up with some fantastic and useful displays. It said the guys were keeping the API open, which leads it in that direction. And they make money for each sale: a good solid business model. I predict success for this company.
Depends. If only one in every ten thousand cars has it, then it's not very useful. If one in every four cars has it, then you're getting a lot of useful information about traffic.
In the meantime, they can make it useful in other ways, perhaps getting real-time traffic feeds from servers, as it hinted it did, and as that feature attracts a user base, they can make it even more attractive by adding features that utilize this network-effect.
I looked at the funding for all of them: 71 million, 11 million, 4 million, 11 million again. Do these ideas really merit or need this kind of capital?
Maybe I'm just jealous. :-)
Back to the GPS... I'd love something that gave me real time traffic and construction updates. Maybe they plan on using "wisdom of the crowds" for that data? What no one needs is one more distraction from driving.
do they report their velocity back to a home server somewhere? so then everyone who buys one would be reporting back to home-base that, e.g., there's congestion on I-5 because there's a ton of our "Dash" GPS units stuck theree, not moving?
If so, cool idea. (If not, feel free to "steal" my idea)
Because it is either the startup scene is in such a bad state that Pownce (which is one of the worst me-too startups I've seen) is among the exciting startups to watch or the writer of the article has little knowledge of startups and innovating technology in general.
I prefer to believe the latter, I believe there are quite a few exciting and innovating startups to watch out there.
