8 big ideas to watch in '08

Sir Richard will help fund U.S. entrepreneurs, jetpacks will finally fly, and GPS devices will show the cheapest gas nearby - plus much more! Check out our Next Little Thing picks for 2008.

Dash Navigation
Avoid commuting pitfalls and find cheap gas with this next-generation GPS service.
Dash Navigation
If you had a magic box in your car that could tell you anything you wanted to know about your daily commute, what would you command? If you answered either "help me avoid traffic" or "find the cheapest gas," congratulations: Your magic box will be in stores starting July 2008 - as long as you're prepared to put down $500, plus $15 a month.

Dash Navigation is more than just a run-of-the-mill GPS unit. In-car GPS devices have been triangulating their location - via the Pentagon's GPS satellites - for years, and the GPS signal itself has been available to the public for decades. Yet the number of units sold per year has yet to crack a million. There are around 230 million cars on the road in the U.S., and less than 7% use GPS. Clearly, the market hasn't been getting what it wants. An electronic map with voice directions is great - until its directions land you in the middle of a rush-hour jam.

With $45 million in funding from VCs, including Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia, Dash aims to fix that.

The company came up with a hyper-networked navigation device that doesn't just use GPS, it also employs GPRS (that is, cell phone data technology) and wifi. In other words, it's always connected, and the various devices chatter to each other constantly, giving them the wisdom of the crowd. When my box sees that I'm doing 15 M.P.H. on a road where cars normally clock 45 M.P.H., it tells the Dash Driver Network. On other Dash devices, the road I'm on starts glowing red, and the computer knows to avoid it when calculating directions.

Because it is also getting regular updates from the Internet, Dash can give you other kinds of up-to-date information. At the push of a button, you instantly get a list of gas stations nearby, sorted by price. As the markets head towards $100 a barrel and $4 a gallon, Dash couldn't have picked a better time to launch, and it's not hard to imagine the gas list will be the company's killer app. But just in case you need other data - like the best place to get dim sum, or show times at the nearest cinema - the company has done a deal with its Silicon Valley neighbor, Yahoo, for local search information. Dash also offers a plug-in for your PC, which lets you send an address direct from the Web, or from Outlook, to your car. No more need to print out the address - or write it by hand on a Post-It.

Virgin Money

Electric cars

Greener charcoal

Jetpacks

Wi-Fly

Weedy wine

Real estate in '08

Advanced GPS
Read the full stories behind our 8 picks for 2008. (more)
Behind the scenes at the Boston launch of Virgin Money, Richard Branson's new peer-to-peer lending service. (more)
Check out how our past Next Little Thing picks are holding up. (more)

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Most stock quote data provided by BATS. Market indices are shown in real time, except for the DJIA, which is delayed by two minutes. All times are ET. Disclaimer. Morningstar: © 2018 Morningstar, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Factset: FactSet Research Systems Inc. 2018. All rights reserved. Chicago Mercantile Association: Certain market data is the property of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. and its licensors. All rights reserved. Dow Jones: The Dow Jones branded indices are proprietary to and are calculated, distributed and marketed by DJI Opco, a subsidiary of S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC and have been licensed for use to S&P Opco, LLC and CNN. Standard & Poor's and S&P are registered trademarks of Standard & Poor's Financial Services LLC and Dow Jones is a registered trademark of Dow Jones Trademark Holdings LLC. All content of the Dow Jones branded indices © S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC 2018 and/or its affiliates.