Dear all,
 
After the big project, I am starting to do my reading and writing again.
 
I have told at least Ken and Angela in private that I am interested in a company called SiRF. Some years back, when I started the work on 3G, the company has done a presentation about location service. Kennis was doing Location Service when we met as well. But indeed, Location Service didn't really take off.
 
Didn't take off, until this year I may say. Someone took it seriously, Nokia. As some of us know, at the beginning of 3G, NEC and Motorola have already build-in AGPS chip on their phone. However, only this year, Nokia has shown its practical usage from a mobile manufacturer point of view. Nokia friends, please elaborate from this point. Beginning of this month, Nokia has bought a digital map company called Navteq for $8.1B. Navteq and TeleAtlas are the major digital map providers in the world. Nokia claimed 100% N95 users using their map application and 20% of the users have subscribed to Nokia's map service. I don't care about if GPS reception is good in HK, but at least I think more and more phones on our hands will have the GSP chips.
 
So, who is eyeing the other map company? Actually, it left TeleAtlas in the market and there are 2 companies which manufacture navigation gears are bidding it; they are TomTom and Garmin. Eric, another 2 companies? Yes, I just want to mention Garmin, since the company market cap is doing 3-folded within this year:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=GRMN
It is an amazing company which many people rated it a buy or top ranked company. A good company should be innovative and expanding with increasing revenue, Garmin is one of them now. Digital Map is a good business now, since companies like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo are also investing on it heavily. However, the winner should be with some mobile devices which need the maps all the time.
 
What's next for location? I think it should be photos and videos with location tag, Sony got that, and many phones in Japan have this function, talked to a guy in Nokia who also said they are developing... interesting.
 
So, back to the original, actually in this world, not many companies are doing GPS chipset, and SiRF Star III is being used as a standard for Nokia (e.g. in N95) and Garmin. Though its PE is quite high now, I am really interested to see how SiRF will go further.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SiRFstar_III
 
p.s. Oil price touched $90 already, it wasn't really long time since we talked about oil price($63 in July)... it is a bit like boiling water, once it reaches 100, it will evaporate...
 
cheers,
Eric
(I am still holding SiRF stock)