masheye.com – beta is a mashups, Web 2.0, Ajax and development oriented social bookmarking website. Explore and enjoy!

$10-$15 per month for the service which includes map updates, poi updates, real time traffic, historical traffic and cellular internet access for whatever you can think (within the bounds of the device) of thanks to some open thinking is more than competitive with the price of map upgrades and traffic from other gps manufacturers. Especially so when you consider the problems inherent with TMC-RDS.

The value of historical traffic, for me, would be in planning ahead for a departure time or in seeing that say on a trip to NYC that while traffic looks good now three hours from now historically I should take a different route.

Most likely any map mashup available for Google Maps or Yahoo! Pipes geo mashup could be used with the Dash Express.

Maybe TomTom or Garmin will come out with something similar but Garmin would be charging $1,500 for this and TomTom is going backwards towards TMC-RDS rather than move forward from bluetooth to embedded cell modem.

I can’t wait. This is the product of the decade.

1. no way to get to the critical mass needed to have differentiated proprietary traffic data generated from the Dash customers (we’re talking a million units nationwide to have something truly different and interesting);
2. no way to compete in terms of price point with TomTom, Mio, Garmin, Google free traffic on phone, or Nokia phone.

The PND market is brutal in terms of BOM and its going to get worse with everything that is going to end up the phone (thanks Nokia/Navteq!).

Dash’s only hope is that automotive or PND people license software to run Dash on other devices but that’s going to be hard as the PND and automotive folks are so scared to add cost to their devices.

I’ve loved these guys for four years but there is just no way this pig flies, no matter what Kleiner puts into it.

honda has the internavi premium club in japan that sounds a whole lot like what dash is trying to do.

Did Dash pay Techcrunch money to write about them?

Oil is now over $90 a barrel. Supply is down, demand is up. It won’t be long now, before only the very wealthy will be driving, some say within the next 5 years or so. Maybe sooner if Bush bombs Iran and they close the Straits of Hormuz. Does investing this much time and money into a dying technology (the automobile) seem like a good idea?

I think the tech/web 2.0 community is in huge denial. Google “Peak Oil”, read “The Long Emergency”, do some research. It might make you rethink where you are spending your time and investments.

Google is the new Windows. Google is the new Microsoft. Tomtom, garmin, this thing, et al will all die when the multitasking mobile developer platform is released. It took me a while to figure it out. Teh evil is back.

It’s going to be pure boom insanity, care of Google. Who cares if there isn’t custom CAD hardware for the App, that’s what touchscreens are for anyway. Wow. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any better. I just figured out what’s going to happen in the next 5 years. SNAP!

I bet anything that’s what Google OS is. If that’s the case it will render hard coded apps like Dash less attractive, like word processes ors did to the typewriter.

All they would have to do is have another vertical column of color-coded buttons where users could press

A – Heavy Traffic
B – Light Traffic
C – Accident
D – Detour
E – Free Flowing

The actual users of the device could press the buttons anytime to report traffic and the server could use an algorithm to prevent spoofing based on votes. This would be so easy. But people who make hardware devices RARELY innovate. They are the most un-dynamic of programmers. I know a lot of them. If web programmers could program devices, it would be mania. Unfortunately it’s above their talents.

We could bring some of the great things that happened in Web 2.0 and integrate them into a device. Things such as tagging and other stuff. We do systems programming here as well.

Why choose a partner (i.e.Inrix) that cannot deliver truly “realtime” data to your customers? Having a monkey throw a dart might be more accurate.

How are you paying for the licensing costs on this? This is not a fixed one time component cost. This is an ongoing licensing fee. Do the users have monthly fees?

They already have to pay for the transfer for the GPRS data. Why didn’t you use P2P between the devices and have users tag traffic data instead, making the service free?

That’s what a smart developer would have done.

Now let me try and address the individual comments / questions:

@Grinn.net – we already have gas prices on the device which we provide to every dash user. If you think GasBuddy’s data is more relevant to you you can add the GeoRSS/KML feed to your device.

@Max – Harnessing the collective intelligence of Dash drivers is something we think a lot about. Nothing to announce… yet.

@MFTMike – I am happy to say that we will be pricing the service well below $20 a month (think Satellite radio pricing).

@my2pac – Yes, we have a GPRS modem in the device, so that is how we connect to the cellular network.

@Jessica Mah – Glad you are excited about the product!

@doubtful – We send down traffic information from two sources. One is Inrix who provides us traffic data for every major metro in the United States. This means that if you are the first driver in a metro with a Dash unit you are still getting live data. The other source is Dash devices.

Mark

We could actually use very low cost commercial development boards to keep a prototype down to a few thousand dollars if you would like us to model one for you. Bluetooth/GPS/GSM/SMS compatible with SIM, command center style nav mashed with whatever data you can think of.

There would be some massive licensing costs, but they could be kept to a minimum, by using as much FOSS as possible. Once a proto is done, then a hardware engineer could come up with board design with the specs, and the CAD could be completed.
I’m just throwing ideas out there. Why let DASH run away with the prize??