Mobitrends

Cars are getting connected, that’s a fact. The first step in that process was with the TomToms connecting though bluetooth to the network to access live information. Now smartphones are replacing PNDs (slowly) and are trying to leverage on their userbase to create user-generated contents of maps and road infos (status, cops…).

Coyote, a French company, is one of the pioneer in that area. They started with a dedicated device that simply used to bind a GPS chip with a database of fix and mobile radars but they evolved very quickly to dedicated connected devices where users have the ability to report the presence of new radars. Each device has a sim card and this is one of the only consumer cases for M2M I know of. They managed to build a community of “coyotes” which is now acts as a fairly strong bareer for any new entrant on the French market. On top of the devices they even added great Android and iPhone apps. At any given time when I’m driving on the motorways I can see a few hundreds coyotes around me. I tried some alternative services such as Waze but we are very far from such a density of users. Nevertheless, as usually for French companies which build great products, they spent so much time on their tiny local market that they will certainly fail at the internationalization stage…

Waze (Israel start-up who recently raised 10M) has gone international from day 1 and is very strong in the US and especially in the West coast where user reports are even used by TV-channels for their road traffic status. 2 weks ago, Blackberry also announced “Blackberry traffic” to let Blackberry users optimize their route. Android phones have had turn-by-turn navigation in the US for a year now and traffic infos are available as an overlay to Google Maps.

It’s fairly interesting to see how the Smartphones are slowly kicking out the PNDs and are adding a lot of social features on top of the simple map/direction. As a proof to that trend, the market of PNDs in Europe in Q1 2010 decreased by 17% YoY from 3.2 to 2.7 M units. That trend and the fact that offline maps are less and less relevant do actually ask a lot of questions regarding the value chain of the sector and seem to put guys like google in a fairly interesting position. Can’t wait for a car powered by Google : Android PND, apps, Google Navigation, always connected, social… They seem to be the closest to that vision today !

GigaOM is running today a story called Yahoo’s Big Plan for the Social Web in 2010: Aggregate It . Aggregating the Social Web is definitely something big for 2010, and obviously Yahoo is not going to be the only one trying this.

Obviously, we all are part of various social networks: some professional, some personals, some where we are active, some where we barely show up, all in the spirit of keeping in touch with our friends and following the real-time web. As such, the social networks websites are not the only place anymore where end-user are willing to check on their social activities. Better user experience, convergent activity view… all those themes open up opportunities for third parties such as software developers (Seesmic) or web portals (Yahoo) to stay in the game without the hassle of actually creating a social network.

Just like with the search, the user experience is a strong factor of adoption for a service thus opening opportunities to create value on top of those services.

While I was shaving this morning, I just realized something really fun, I have the exact same social patterns in World of Warcraft as I have in the real life.
Let me explain:
in WoW I’m not really part of any guild, mostly because those are really time consuming if you want to take fully advantage of what a guild can bring to your game experience. Thus I’m mostly a lonely player, yet I still go for high goals and heavy instances by gathering people from my contact list the moment I need help. And I never hesitate to help someone in need for my tauren DK/warrior two handed mace and spells.

So somehow this make me a independent guy with a network of partners / subcontractors that I can book for a few hours of their time to help me reach my goals and with whom I share my know-how and rewards as they come… sounds a lot like the way I’m behaving in real life business actually!

Tell me how you play and I’ll tell you who you are.