New GPS device and service verge on the bizarre, intrusive

From mobile car karaoke to smart coupons that know where shoppers are, GPS is everywhere

By Mark Hiratsuka 27 November, 2009

Let the rolling Karaoke competitions begin with Sony's new GPS Nav-u.

We’d be naive to believe modern consumer tech isn’t at least in part designed to keep us on the straight and narrow road to being better little consumers, yet somehow two new GPS arrivals manage to surprise by going that extra mile. We take a look at the new Sony 'Sing-Your-Little-Head-Off' mobile karaoke Nav-u GPS device and the ‘Shufoo-Oh-Damn-Big-Brother-Is-Watching-Me’ GPS coupon service.

Sony Nav-u -- karaoke on the go

Sony’s new range of ‘Nav-u’ car sat-nav boxes features marketing that’s as targeted as usual – pink for the ladies; portable with pedestrian and cyclist modes on offer too – but it’s the advertising that’s straight outta left field.

The singing in the car commercials about to start playing all over Japan in December are part of a competition in which entrants film themselves barking along to the car stereo, post the results on YouTube and line up in hope of snaring a prize of around US$10,000.

In case you’re wondering, the prize money is calculated to be the value of ten years’ of domestic holidays. Sony says folk take an average of 2.77 trips a year, the average cost of each being ¥30,390. Added up over a decade, that comes to ¥841,803 ($9,692).

Anyway, we just hope the user-submitted content is anything like as slick as Sony’s efforts, otherwise Japan’s in for a long winter of diss-content.

Shufoo GPS shopping-coupon service --coupons use you

There’s a location-based addition to the Shufoo shopping-coupon service that uses the cellular network and a phone’s GPS chip to ‘blast’ discount vouchers from nearby stores to a registered user’s handset.

Once signed up for Shufoo (a pun based on the Japanese word for housewife, shufu – again with the targeted marketing) cost-conscious shoppers have to do nothing beyond pinball between retailers, racking up phone coupons as they go (and letting the network see where you're shopping?)

Unlike the Sony scheme, there’s no promise of untold riches for participants – they’ll just have to make do with good, honest discounts at around 20,000 stores across Japan.

Perhaps one of them will manage to work out a healthy slice off the cost of a new GPS box, a video camera and the car needed to get mobile karaoke-ing on TV next month.