Rocket Scientist, all. Read an article this morning about a product called 'LoJack' which is a transmitter installed in your auto. When the car is stolen, the owner calls the cops who activate the transmitter and then scan the receiver installed in their cruisers. Seems to work pretty effectively, subject to 3-5 mile range limitations, fairly high price ($500), signal loss in hilly areas, and a few other kinks. Very high success rates on nabbing the robbers all in all.
A competing product called "Telitrack" uses GPS and is subject to no range limitations, though the article provided no other details. Would the G* constellation be suitable for this purpose? Apologies in advance for asking as I think the answer is: "G* was designed for telephony not data and GPS uses GEOs not LEOs and no it won't work for OmniTracks either".
I keep batting my head against this wall because we've got a few billion dollars worth of birds (working brilliantly by all accounts) circling the globe and carrying about one zillionth of their signal capacity. Drives me nuts, and it might drive Maurice straight off the farm and onto Madison Avenue to wake up the marketing department. How many brains does it take to figure this out? Surfer Mike to marketing department, Biz 1A:
Your fixed costs are very large, but they are fixed.
Your marginal costs are very small, damn near zip.
The constellation has a finite life, make hay now dudes.
Every penny of marginal revenue counts big time, see 2.
Think "network effect": it's very trendy and very true, a combination rarely seen these days.
This should lead you to give away handsets by the boat load , sign up every former Iridium customer with six months of free service, and otherwise GET PEOPLE YAKKING THEIR HEADS OFF USING GLOBALSTAR TELEPHONY SERVICES. Unlike 95% of the dot.coms, you can adjust prices later and people will stay around as long as you don't go crazy. We do not care about revenue metrics now, just subscribers and MOUs, thank you very much. End of lecture. SM |
