December 10, 2007

Garmin to buy Inrix?

An analyst thinks that Garmin is going to make a play for Inrix, the often mentioned here traffic information provider to the TMC traffic service. Making the argument, the analyst for ABI assumes that Garmin wants the leverage in the market. Not so sure that’s true, as they just signed a long extension with NAVTEQ, owner of Traffic.com.

While the theory may or may not be on the mark, the article does provide some validation on an idea that traffic services is going to be big. Specifically, this research says that traffic services could be a multi-billion dollar a year business within a decade.

I continue to see signs that we are about to get a lot more capability not only in GPS, but online and through mobile phones. The market is ripe for a better way to beat traffic is be aware of what issues lie ahead.

Accurate travel time estimations require better knowledge of primary and secondary road speeds. Getting that information requires reporting on that data through road sensors, GPS equipped vehicles that can report back on their travel times (think delivery trucks), and anonymous mobile phone data.

There are three basic ways to collect traffic data:

Road Sensors – strips or radar type guns monitor volume and speed along a highway. Oldest form of technology.

GPS Probe Data – Vehicles equipped with GPS and two way communication can report back road speed data. Think taxi’s and delivery trucks.

Mobile Phone Monitoring – As the millions of mobile phones travel down roads, they report back to cell towers and that information is stripped of the owner’s ID, aggregated and passed on as speed and traffic incident reporting. Newest form of data collection.

As you would imagine it’s a numbers and technology game. If you can turn the hundreds of millions of phones out there into usable data, it will be a powerful tool.

The big players are:

Inrix – road sensors, and GPS “probe” data helps it report on a vast amount of roadways.

Traffic.com – road sensors primarily and now GPS probe data; now owned by NAVTEQ

AirSage – Sees how fast anonymous mobile phone users are traveling down a road to deliver data.

IntelliOne – Similar to AirSage uses anonymous mobile phone data to map road speeds. See their demonstration on Tampa Florida to get an idea of how this works on a vast series of roadways.

Want to read more? Check out all of my posts on Traffic.

Via

Thanks to Jim for sending in the article.

Read More in: Garmin GPS News | Traffic News