Turn Here, Trust MeDash's amazing new GPS gizmo guides you around traffic.
Posted Thursday, July 31, 2008, at 3:52 PM ET
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StumbleUponThere's an obvious chicken-and-egg problem with Dash's system. In order to get good traffic data, Dash needs a lot of drivers—but to get a lot of drivers, it needs good traffic data. The company argues, though, that because many drivers follow similar routes, it can achieve a critical mass relatively quickly. In an average-sized metro area, Dash needs only a few hundred drivers before most of its data is coming from the crowd, says Mark Williamson, Dash's director of product marketing. In the largest areas—New York City and Los Angeles—Dash needs only a few thousand devices to get a good picture of traffic. (Dash won't say how many drivers it has in each of those areas.)
Dash's Internet connectivity helps with things besides traffic. Traditional GPS devices ship with databases of millions of shops and attractions across the country. Like a printed phone book, these databases go out of date: If you bought your GPS a couple of months ago, for instance, it will think there are 600 more Starbucks in the country than there now are. Over time, as roads shut down and new developments spring up, maps go stale. In order to refresh your device, you've got to buy an update disk.
Dash updates itself automatically with the latest maps, and it offers something an order of magnitude more useful than a built-in database of attractions: a Web-based search engine. When you look for nearby shops in Dash, you're really searching Yahoo, which already knows about all those shuttered Starbucks.
For all this great functionality, Dash faces a major vulnerability as a business proposition: Many of its features can be replicated on smartphones. Technically, the iPhone can do everything Dash does—it's got the Internet, GPS, and a touch-screen interface. It's possible to imagine another start-up building a Dash clone on Apple's device or on any other advanced phone. Considering how many of them are out there, the crowd-sourced traffic information generated by the iPhone would put Dash's data to shame.
Williamson told me that the company is keenly aware of that possibility. For now, he says, Dash is offering its service on only its own GPS device, but he did mention the possibility of porting it to other gadgets, like the iPhone.
In the meantime, the traffic data that Dash learns from its drivers could also prove valuable. The licensing possibilities look lucrative—Google, Microsoft, and Apple might all want better traffic data for their maps products. UPS, FedEx, and the Postal Service could probably also do with a clearer picture of road conditions. And Dash might even be able to help Starbucks out. At a recent tech conference, a Dash executive pointed out that Dash knows where people drive and knows where people search for coffee. That means it knows exactly where Starbucks should open up its next location in Arkansas: Highway 40, between Little Rock and Memphis, Tenn.
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