Dash Express

» see dash.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

This one I could not have used even if somebody had shipped it to Ankara, and that is a property of the product rather than of the border. Dash Express was sold in the United States only, and its main feature only worked in a city where enough other people had already bought one. A navigation box that depends on the density of its own customers is a thing you cannot really export, and by 2008 I was a working engineer watching this category from the outside while my own navigation problem was being solved by a phone.

Dash Navigation was founded in Mountain View in 2002 and spent six years on one idea. Every other satnav on the market in 2007 was a receiver, listening to satellites and to a broadcast traffic feed if you paid for one. Dash put a cellular modem and Wi-Fi in the box so the thing could talk back. It reached the public in march 2008 at $599.99 with three months of service included, after taking Best of CES honors from CNET and LAPTOP the year before.

The feature was called TruTraffic and it ran on the Dash Driver Network, which is a polite name for the customers. Each unit anonymously reported its own position and speed, the servers turned that into a live picture of which roads were actually moving, and the picture went back out to every other unit. Not a highway sensor loop or a traffic helicopter. The drivers were the instrument, and the more of them there were in your area the better your own routing got.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what was in the box ~

A 4.3 inch screen on a 400 MHz processor, with a two hour battery so you could carry it inside, and hardware built by First International Computers in the same division that produced the Openmoko phones. The light sensor that switched the display between day and night modes was the kind of small correctness that cheap units did not bother with.

The connected part went further than traffic. You could search Yahoo Local from the device itself, so finding food on the road did not require knowing an address in advance, and Send2Car let you push a destination from a browser at home straight into the car. There was a portal called MyDash for managing what was on the unit, and an open platform where people wrote their own applications, including the inevitable speed trap reporters. In 2008 that was a developer ecosystem on a satnav, which nobody else was even pretending to attempt.

~ the floor moved ~

The price came down to $399.99 on Amazon within weeks of launch, and the subscription ran from $9.99 a month on a two year commitment up to $12.99 for month by month. That is a monthly bill attached to a category where the competition was a one time purchase and getting cheaper every quarter.

Then the floor moved. The iPhone 3G arrived in july 2008 with GPS in it, and by october 2009 Google was giving away turn by turn navigation on Android, built on traffic crowdsourced from phones that people were already carrying and already paying a data bill for. Dash had built its network out of hardware it had to sell one unit at a time. Google built the same network out of a permission dialog.

~ the postmortem ~

In november 2008, eight months after going on sale, Dash Navigation left the hardware business and cut around 55 jobs, roughly two thirds of the company. The plan after that was to license the technology into built-in car systems and phones, and it kept supporting the units already out on the road. TIME still put the Express on its best inventions list for that year, which arrived after the company had stopped making it.

Research In Motion bought Dash Navigation in june 2009 for an undisclosed figure, wanting the traffic engineering rather than the boxes, and gave notice that service and support ended on 30 june 2010. On that day every Dash Express in America stopped being a connected device and became a plain map with an old database in it. dash.net does not resolve. The idea it proved is now running silently in every phone on the road, which is either vindication or the least useful kind of being right.

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