Garmin has decided to close its San Francisco office, resulting in the loss of most of the  team that built MotionBased, the original Garmin Connect platform, which was acquired by Garmin in 2005. A new website, The GC Team, has been posted, saying:

On February 8, 2010 Garmin decided to shut down operations at its San Francisco office and move all Garmin Connect product management/development back to headquarters in Olathe, Kansas.  For as much as the team in San Francisco loves working on Garmin Connect, most of us – if not all – are choosing not to relocate to Kansas.

We’ve created this site to showcase what and how we built Garmin Connect.  And most importantly, we’d like to introduce you to our talented team that made Garmin Connect one of the top fitness and outdoor recreation websites in the world.

It is unknown how this will affect future development of the popular (and promising) Garmin Connect site.

The chart at the top of this post shows the most searched for business locations during the month of December. Sure, this is just a subset of the population, but with 13 million subscribers, TeleNav has a pretty good sample size here. Yes, it’s biased by all sorts of confounding variables, but it still paints quite the picture of where folks are going. And variables such as percentage of the population using smartphone navigation will become less of an issue over time.

Check out their news release for more info.

Disclosure: I’m part of a group of bloggers who were given access to TeleNav staff under their “Waypoint” program. TeleNav covered travel costs for all participants for a meeting in Cupertino, California in February 2010.

I’ve covered both routes and tracks in this series, so now it’s time to do a direct comparison. Here are some key differences:

• Routes are about where you are planning to go; tracks are about where you have been
• Backcountry routes typically use straight-line, “as the crow flies” navigation; tracks more accurately reflect the shape of the trail, with all its twists and turns

This can be seen in the image above. The magenta route shows straight-line segments between waypoints, while the yellow track shows the actual shape of the trail.

As I mentioned in my routes post, you need to be aware of the difference, especially when it comes to distance. The route segments above total 4.2 miles, while the track (the actual trail distance) comes in at 6.4 miles.

Notice that there are places where the next waypoint in the route may actually be behind you, due to turns in the trail. It’s easy to get confused if you’re concentrating entirely on the GPS. That’s just one of several reasons to carry a paper map with you, a subject for a future post in this series.

Exceptions to the rule

Garmin’s 24K series maps and DeLorme’s Topo USA are both capable of trail routing, eliminating this “as the crow files” routing problem. A new feature recently added to the Garmin Dakota and Oregon lines allows for this too.

Other posts in this series:

• Handheld GPS 101: Waypoints
• Handheld GPS 101: Routes
• Handheld GPS 101: Tracks