Telematics Weekly

industry insight, news and interviews paid sponsor: Sancomm, Inc. Free Subscription January 27, 2012

In a world where con­ve­nience is king, mega online retail­ers con­tinue to stake their claim. Ama­zon, ShopRun­ner, Wal­Mart, Tar­get, etc. all pro­vide online access to every­day and niche items that can be deliv­ered to your door with a swipe of your credit card (not really but you get the idea). Lost in the excite­ment of a grow­ing e-​​commerce mar­ket is yours truly… the cus­tomer. Sure, it would be easy to join the masses and assim­i­late to the grow­ing con­scious­ness that all online cus­tomers are more inter­ested in coupons and ship­ping costs and less con­cerned with cus­tomer ser­vice. How­ever, did any­one notice that customer-​​centric com­pa­nies like Nord­strom con­tinue to build value and earn a profit?

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Hyundai’s Nameless Telematics System to Rival OnStar

Hyundai’s sys­tem focuses on “four buck­ets of ser­vice”: Safety and Secu­rity (includ­ing theft immo­bi­liza­tion and auto­matic emer­gency ser­vice noti­fi­ca­tion in the event of a crash), Info­tain­ment (wire­less con­nec­tiv­ity fea­tures for tele­phone, music, etc.), Nav­i­ga­tion (like OnStar’s turn-​​by-​​turn direc­tion ser­vice), and Vehi­cle Diag­nos­tics, a tool for both own­ers and deal­ers that could help track the need for main­te­nance and poten­tially even notify one’s dealer to order parts for a forth­com­ing repair.

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Nokia Siemens Considers Cash Infusion

Nokia Siemens Net­works is in talks with sev­eral buy­out firms about sell­ing up to a third of the com­pany for at least $1 bil­lion in cash, The Wall Street Jour­nal reported on Sat­ur­day, cit­ing “peo­ple famil­iar with the mat­ter.” Poten­tial investors report­edly include Sil­ver Lake Part­ners, TPG, Black­stone, Bain Cap­i­tal and KKR. As the name implies, Nokia and Siemens each cur­rently own half of the venture.

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The pro­lif­er­a­tion of stan­dard­ized, inter­linked GSfM/​GPRS net­works across large swaths of land­scape, cou­pled with the devel­op­ment of smaller, lower-​​power GPS devices, have been the pri­mary dri­vers for the surg­ing mar­ket for asset track­ing and mon­i­tor­ing in the last few years. We might describe this as Phase 1 of the Mobile Machine-​​to-​​Machine (M2M) Rev­o­lu­tion. But only about ten per­cent of the Earth’s sur­face is cov­ered by ter­res­trial wire­less net­works. What about the other 90 per­cent? For many appli­ca­tions – such as ships and boats at sea, fixed wing air­craft and heli­copters in the air, and vehi­cles and heavy machin­ery in sparsely pop­u­lated regions of the world –  ter­res­trial wire­less data links are unavail­able or unreliable.

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Android to usher in age of M-​​Commerce?

Con­tact­less pay­ment tech­nolo­gies have been around for years, and buy­ing goods with cell­phones is com­mon­place in some parts of the world, but in the U.S., e-​​wallets haven’t caught on. Android’s upcom­ing Gin­ger­bread OS update may change that. “This mode of pay­ment has been cry­ing out for more enabled devices,” said Nitesh Patel, a senior ana­lyst at Strat­egy Analytics.

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Social Media and the Sustainable Supply Chain

In the cur­rent mar­ket, prod­uct line exten­sion and value engi­neer­ing are more impor­tant than con­ven­tional inno­va­tion. But as we all begin to inno­vate inter­nal to our prod­ucts rather than by build­ing new cat­e­gories, the risks asso­ci­ated with get­ting inno­va­tion wrong esca­late. This is where social media plays a role.

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Cloud Computing on the Rise

A new study has found a rise on the adop­tion of cloud com­put­ing among small and medium sized busi­nesses in the first half of 2010. Dur­ing the first half of 2010, 14 per­cent of small and medium busi­nesses (SMBs) reported using cloud com­put­ing ser­vices and another 10 per­cent reported plans to deploy cloud-​​based ser­vices, accord­ing to a new study con­ducted by Spiceworks.

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Personalizing E-​​Commerce with We-​​Commerce

Social shop­ping sites are now har­ness­ing the power and promise of net­works. They are evolv­ing along with con­sumer expec­ta­tions and desires, shap­ing a new world for e-​​commerce.

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Storm A’Brewin’ at Verizon

Ver­i­zon Wire­less only added 997,000 new cus­tomers com­pared with 1.2 mil­lion new cus­tomers dur­ing the same period one year ear­lier. There was a 25 per­cent drop in third-​​quarter profit. Its net income dropped. Oper­at­ing rev­enue dropped. And it won fewer new cus­tomers than AT&T Mobility.

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FCC Broadband Plan Still an Enigma

The Fed­eral Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Com­mis­sion wants to bring broad­band to every­one in the coun­try, and both gov­ern­ment and indus­try agree it is nec­es­sary. But like many grand plans, the devil is in the details.

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