The Eternal Darkness Of The Clueless Mind II

OK I hope fellow blogger Mike Slocombe doesn’t get to PO’d at my comments here, but it’s almost as if I were predicting the future when I posted this morning about the continual cloudlessness of Americans toward geography and travel.

Actually, looking at the site where this was first published it appears Mike might be a Brit, I don’t know it’s one of those built for adds sites that don’t make it very easy to find out much about the folks behind it.

Anyway, a GPS car navigation unit that covers many of the world’s countries. Actually, this many:
http://www.carpoint.co.kr/eng/countries/countries.asp

The write-up just drips with sarcasm and ridicule as if some silly South Korean country was planning on people driving their cars across the oceans. But if you go to the company’s site (with excellent English pages, by the way, no Babelfish needed) the idea behind a business tool like this is well thought out.

Folks, people travel. In many cases to earn a living. In the case of the US, right now sitting ‘fat dumb and happy’ while China and other Asian rising stars take away our business, we don’t travel nearly often enough.

It’s almost a no-brainer in many people’s minds that a GPS navigation device for the car can be a useful tool. Even inside the US, many business travelers readily pay the outrageous rents that car hire companies charge for an onboard GPS.

Now it it’s worth the time and expense of say a New York-based business traveler renting a car navigator in San Francisco, how much more useful is it going to be for that traveler to take along his or her own navigator, and how much more useful still is it of the destination is London … or Melbourne … or Beijing?

Depending upon the number of country’s maps order this unit starts below $500 USD … a fee that’s less than many business travelers pay for their Blackberries. And, if it keeps a car full of executives on a trip from wasting an hour being lost and missing their business meeting? Priceless.