October - 2005 issue > On The Cover

By Pradeep Shankar

Speeding on South Korean roads? If you think no one is looking, you’d be sure to get a ticket, for every fifth or sixth intersection will have a camera. You will never know when the camera will capture you! But here is the idea; your car has a built-in speed trap avoidance system. Approach a speed trap camera and the device goes crazy, beeping wildly while reminding you of the legal speed limit.

Cut to Netherlands: Suppose you are in a park with your two children and one of them wanders off. Your heart just literally stops! Using the child locator system you can locate where your child is at any moment. When your child is at school, you can track your kids’ location information via mobile phone. How about using the same system to locate your pets? Literally, there are thousands of location-based consumer applications one can think of.

Now you’re on Park Avenue in New York City, looking for that quaint little Italian restaurant in midtown Manhattan. You could use your Nextel cell phone or a navigation system to provide you turn-by-turn directions to your destination. In fact, to any address in the North American continent and Hawaii.

Under the hood of these applications is a special signal processor built for Global Positioning System, a satellite-based technology to pinpoint location anywhere in the world. With a GPS-enabled wireless device, two things happen. First, the GPS hardware fires up and starts hunting down satellites to calculate position. And then the device makes a quick connection to a special server run by the service provider, which quickly delivers location based content or service.

Building the GPS chipsets is a quiet company in San Jose, CA: SiRF. The company has grown and thrived in the past ten years. “The power of having the location information with you wherever you go is like having power of time, wherever you go. As we get into the mobile society, the power of location becomes more important than ever before,” says Kanwar Chadha, the company’s founder and vice president of marketing.
Since going public in April 2004, the company has seen revenues climb 60 percent to $117 million, and net profit hit $30.7 million last year. Strong order booking and demand for its GPS products puts SiRF on a different terrain. SiRF expects the growth to continue.

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