The Manufacturer's Road

摘要

In a relatively short time, the current consumer markets have enlarged to the point that almost 10 percent of U.S. households now own some personal navigation device. Let's take a look at how the market has evolved and the drivers mat will influence development in 2008.rnThe Wayback Machine. The date is 1990, a year that fielded the first five-year study of the potential of GPS and only one year after a fledging GPS World magazine was born. No great banners proclaimed that this technology would become the hottest Christmas gift of 2007, nor that it even had a bright future. The satellite constellation was still incomplete, coverage limited, and applications still forming in the minds of developers and manufacturers. Selective Availability (SA)rnpromoting location-based social networking. The advent of smartphones (network-independent) takes location-based services (LBS to another level and attracts large enterprise and small-to-medium business interest. What will we see in 2008 mass-market applications?