Garmin Enters LBS Market With Garmin LBS Toolkit

Garmin is moving to solidify its role in mobile phone solutions by launching a location based service, or LBS, toolkit that will allow providers to incorporate Garmin's navigation capabilities into their service offerings. A long standing question in my mind has been the GPS titans' roles in the emerging market for mobile phone applications. With this move, it appears that Garmin is continuing to make sure that mobile phones are inside their circle of influence. It's my point of view that giving solid navigation directions is fairly easy, but that having an easy to use interface integrated with a solid dataset is not, and that's what Garmin can bring to the party here.

The other thing that is interesting here is that it reminded me of the gas price advisor functionality in the Garmin mobile product. Inrix recently announced that they were going to offer fuel price data through their datafeeds (they provide traffic data through most GPS systems in the US). While it may take a while to get Gas price data to your GPS system, this release here reminds me that Garmin knows this is a nice offering and if the technical hurdles could be cleared, they'd like to see it in a new product too. I think that would be great.

More on the press release below:

Garmin announced the availability of the Garmin LBS Toolkit, a flexible location-based service platform that can serve as the engine behind third party LBS applications. The Garmin LBS Toolkit incorporates Garmin's proven navigation API, local search, real-time content delivery services, and mobile advertising delivery
services, into one powerful platform.

"This announcement marks the launch of our broader LBS strategy by opening up our LBS technology to third party application developers around the world," said Charles Morse, Garmin's director of mobile and PND marketing. "Adding Garmin's LBS Toolkit to mobile applications can enhance the value and utility of virtually any location aware mobile application, from enterprise and fleet management, real estate, medical, family tracking, pedestrian, automotive, local search, and many others."

The launch customers for Garmin LBS Toolkits are Xora and Agilis leading GPS tracking and mobile resource management software providers. These companies will leverage Garmin's navigation API to deliver turn-by-turn navigation experience to mobile works, thus further improving their productivity. Thanks to the Garmin LBS Toolkit, mobile workers can enter a specific street address into their mobile phone and receive turn-by-turn, text-to-speech, voice prompted directions to their destination. If a driver misses a turn, Garmin's navigation technology will automatically recalculate a new route to the destination. In addition, the mobile worker's office can dispatch the worker to the next service location by sending a destination to the phone, which the worker can accept and route to with the push of a button.

The Garmin LBS Toolkit is a proven technology platform currently in use in Garmin Mobile(TM), a feature-rich consumer application delivering maps, turn- by-turn navigation, and dynamic content such as Weather, Traffic, and Gas Prices on select handsets.

November 7, 2006

Garmin Enters LBS Market With Garmin LBS Toolkit