SailNet Community banner
  • SailNet is a forum community dedicated to Sailing enthusiasts. Come join the discussion about sailing, modifications, classifieds, troubleshooting, repairs, reviews, maintenance, and more!

Garmin buys Active Captain

6K views 46 replies 28 participants last post by  blynchmd.rl 
#1 ·
#2 ·
WHoooooaaaahhhhh!

Docwa / Polar Navy / Nobeltec / Rosepoint / Maxsea / MX Mariner, and their users, are not going to like this...

This kind of kills the value of AC, unless Garmin pledges to keep it an independent entity.

In my estimation, participation and therefore new reviews in AC seem to have tapered off since 2013.

I can't blame the Seigels for trying to make a buck tho... Too bad :(
 
#17 ·
The Garmin InReach is a locator (like SPOT) on steriods, adding SMS. The Iridium GO! is a bona fide satellite terminal. Not really comparable.

Maybe this will cut down their spam emails? I am continually getting emails to book new AC-listed harbors. Maybe Garmin will be able to track where I actually go (thanks to relaxed internet rules) and find out that I'm not a candidate for their advertising.
Log into ActiveCaptain (AC) and check your preferences. I get only two emails from AC each week, both newsletters that I signed up for. No ads at all. No solicitations.

AltaVista was owned by Digital Equipment Corp. (does anyone remember DEC?)?
Do you know the PDP story? Why it was called a PDP? I grew up with a PDP-11, cut my teeth on an 11/750 and had a microVAX at home for a while.

I haven't used AC much... and I am not sure the advantage of integrating AC into a plotter over using it stand alone on a smart phone.
I'm real happy with AC on a smartphone app. I use the plotter for navigation. The app on my phone, laying in my bunk below, gives me plenty of time for research and planning.

I suppose Jeff wanted to cash out and good for him.
Jeff and Karen are serial entrepreneurs. This is not their first business. I know of three they have built from scratch and sold when the fun of doing something new and exciting transitioned to operations. I probably don't know about all of them. I expected this to happen someday. I hope there is a good long relationship between Jeff & Karen and Garmin. Jeff has a real personality and that sets a lot of people off. So what?

This acquisition could (could) lead to some really good stuff. Maybe we'll see AC on Navionics. Maybe we'll see AC on OpenCPN. I hope we won't lose the AC newsletter or Karen's Marina Minute.
 
#6 ·
I keep waiting to see a fleet of boats piled up inside Fire Island inlet from following the "crowd sourced" information from 2011,2012 all no longer pertinent to a sand channel that moves every year. the posts are not cleared or verified which makes them dangerous to folks not sufficiently wary. i ynderstand the value of some of it but with many reservations...

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G930A using Tapatalk
 
#8 ·
I can NOT relate...

I have never received more than one ActiveCaptain email per week, and those that I received were welcome. They would discuss an issue pertinent to cruisers, like anchor watch software AND they would include a special for a product discount at Defender.

Becky at Docwa, on the other hand, is a pest.
 
#13 ·
ActiveCaptain is a crowdsourced database. Its usefulness and accuracy are proportional to the number of people using it. Part of AC's appeal is that it is perceived to be platform independent.

I can only relate this in terms of my experience; What would have happened to Google if IBM or Sun Microsystems (now known as Oracle) had purchased them in 1996? Does anyone even remember the AltaVista search engine? AltaVista was owned by Digital Equipment Corp. (does anyone remember DEC?)?
 
#18 ·
Does anyone even remember the AltaVista search engine? AltaVista was owned by Digital Equipment Corp. (does anyone remember DEC?)?
That example doesn't make your point. AltaVista was a DEC research project - invented, developed and deployed by DEC. It wasn't bought by DEC and then disappeared - it thrived under DEC. The reason for its demise was the purchase of DEC by Compaq, who then bastardized AltaVista into irrelevance.

So your point would be better pointing out what happened to DEC/AV when purchased by Compaq.

Mark
 
#14 ·
Seems to me that the crowd sourcing of cruising info has some value. It's subjective, not verified and should be taken with a grain of salt. It feels like an online real time cruising guide. And real time is the way publishing guides and so forth is and needs to go. Print is out of date before the ink dries.

I haven't used AC much... and I am not sure the advantage of integrating AC into a plotter over using it stand alone on a smart phone.

Can anyone who DOES use AC with a plotter... kindly explain?

I suppose Jeff wanted to cash out and good for him.
 
#15 ·
Garmin could follow any one of the existing plans. Buy a Garmin car GPS, pay an extra $50 up front, and you get lifetime map updates and traffic.
Or buy the updates when and if you want them.

Buy an Escort radar detector, and you get a free year of crowd-sourced live radar reports, bought as a subscription after.

Garble Maps for your Android, constantly update for free but inflict you with ads and datamining. Or join into Waze, same owners, different ads.

Many ways that Garmin could decide to use AC either to generate sales, or income, or both. Seeing the way that everything on the web is so infested with ads and datamining these days...
 
#16 ·
Great news!
Hearty congratulations to Jeff and Karen!

I love seeing where hard work finally gets bought up by some rich multinat giving real $$$ to real people!

Maybe they can work on for a few years with less stress and cruise more and more to they can cruise full time.

Garmin, like other nav companies is over priced, under performing, and old fashioned. They need to move ahead and do it fast before Google Earth takes over. Garmin sux.

I hope Jeff and Karen get plastered with a huge bottle of champagne. They deserve it! 🍸😁🍸
 
#22 ·
A well established alternative to AC is sQuiddio.

"Find and rate the best marinas, anchorages and other sailing destinations. Display them on your OpenCPN chart."

Free, open source, crowd sourced, and is fully integrated with OpenCPN. Covers all bodies of water including coastal, rivers, and inland lakes. And it has a wonderful interface.

I've been using this for a couple of years now.
 
#25 ·
That isn't what I heard directly from Jeff. I also got the same story from Dave on the OpenCPN team. OpenCPN didn't like the interface and wanted it changed. They also wanted insight into data handling on the AC side of the interface.

I don't think Jeff takes issue with open source per se. It is the open source religion he doesn't trust.
 
#26 ·
In any event no deal was done with OpenCpn. They were the losers.
AC lived not only to fight another day but is vindicated by selling to Garmin. And as noted by Auspicious, if Garmin were making the offer OpenCpn would have made a deal.

It just goes to show you the deal making in-abilities of a bunch of volunteers compared to professional money-in-the-game business people.

If Garmin were to offer AC in better ways to all formats EXCEPT OpenCpn then OpenCpn could be a thing of the past. So their non-deal looks even more foolish now than it did then.

How stupid can you be to refuse to put AC into your program?


Mark
 
#27 ·
As a long-time user of OpenCPN and ActiveCaptain, I really don't care that AC is not embedded in O. I have plenty of other ways to get that data on other devices/programs. Maybe Dave Register did screw up, and maybe it will lead to the demise of O. But I think O does a very good job at what it does, so I expect that it will stay around for quiet awhile.

Interestingly, the opposite is possible also. Suppose Garmin wants to limit AC data to their own devices/programs for competitive advantage, and discontinues support for competitive paid and free software? Then all that time spent building in AC support would have been wasted.

Yes, I realize that such a move by Garmin could "kill the goose that laid the golden egg." Yeah, that would be the first time a corporation ever did something like this to an acquisition! :rolleyes:

Only time will tell...
 
  • Like
Reactions: MarkofSeaLife
#29 ·
At the time, OCPN did publicly present the AC issue as one of not complying with open source licensing, and Jeff's public responses at the time differed from how Auspicious seems to remember them now. However, OCPN does at times seem to be deep into open source religion to the point of blindness.

Another example is why OCPN is not available on iPads/iPhones. The reason is that Apple's App Store terms state that app licenses are limited to only 10 devices or so for each user (I pulled the number 10 out of the air - I don't remember the exact number, but it was large enough to not be a reasonable concern to private use). OCPN went on a snit about that because the open source licensing states that it can be used on unlimited devices. They actually gave as an example the US Navy would have problems deploying OCPN on all of their ships.

Keep in mind that OCPN is free, so one could download as many copies as they wanted if they had a very large number of devices needing it (not to mention they could just use a single copy and not tell Apple they were using it on more than X number of devices). Also keep in mind that the US Navy does not run OCPN in any capacity, and never will.

I like and support open source, and very much like and regularly use OCPN, but sometimes the fanatics are their own worse enemy. Likewise, sometimes Active Captain is its own worse enemy.

Mark
 
#32 ·
On the depths side of things, an alternative may be the initiative by the IHO (the umbrella body for NOAA, UKHO and all other national hydrographic offices).
They've had a workgroup looking at crowd sourced bathymetry (CSB) for the last couple of years, and two things have come out of it:
- they are in the process of putting up a repository for CSB tracks of boats with GPS and sounder data that will be available as open data under a Creative Commons licence
- they have just produced a draft of a guidebook on logging data for CSB - you can see it and comment on it here: TeamSurv IHO Crowd Sourced Bathymetry Document
TeamSurv (which I'm involved with) has been on the IHO committee and will be acting as one of the "trusted nodes" contributing data to the IHO site - we'd be glad to have any of you join in.
Tim
 
#42 ·
ActiveCaptain is/was a nice tool for quickly locating marinas and services and getting information about them. It was nice to read user reviews of anchorages for holding and the level of activity in those locations.

However, my sailing life would not be drastically affected one way or the other if the tool failed and disappeared. I used and enjoyed it, but did not "rely" on it. If AC disappeared tomorrow, there are always printed cruising guides and of course, the proper charts which any prudent person should be using anyway.

In other words- "Meh."
 
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top