PriceSCAN Press Release
8/4/09
Price Drops in Auto GPS - Voice Recognition and Auto GPS - Text to Speech Indices Widens Spread between Two to Historic Levels
PriceSCAN Vice President of Financial Products Daniel Fehder commented that, “The Auto GPS – Voice Recognition Index dropped 3% last week and the Auto GPS – Text to Speech Index dropped 2%. These drops have led to the largest spread between the two indices on record. After beginning the year within a point of one another, the Auto GPS –Voice Recognition index is now 28 points lower than the Text to Speech Index.
Jeff Trester, PriceSCAN Co-CEO and Chief Economist, noted, “Voice recognition represents the most advanced form of automotive GPS, and in the earlier portion of a technology’s life-cycle we often see rapid marking down of the “state of the art” premium. That discounting may account for the faster decline of voice recognition GPS prices versus the older text to speech GPS technology. Of course the fact that both indices are falling precipitously speaks to weak consumer demand, especially given that rising gas prices could actually support GPS value by increasing the cost of driving around lost.”
About The PriceSCAN Manufactured Product Indices
The PriceSCAN Manufactured Product Indices are a set of 50 indices tracking a broad array of finished good prices at the retail level. The PriceSCAN indices are carried on Bloomberg's data service under the ticker symbol PRIC and are available on PriceSCAN.com’s website at http://www.pricescan.com/indices. PriceSCAN.com also makes available customized data packages for clients in the financial, technology and retail communities.
About the PriceSCAN.com Econometric Team
Dr. Jeffrey J. Trester is Co-CEO and Chief Economist of PriceSCAN. After graduating MIT and attending Yale for graduate studies in theoretical physics, Dr. Trester received his PhD in financial economics from the Wharton School. He has also served on the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank’s Business Council. Daniel C. Fehder is Vice President of Financial Products at PriceSCAN.com. A graduate of Harvard and University of Pennsylvania, he can be reached for comment at analytics {at} pricescan.com
About PriceSCAN.com, Inc
Founded in 1997, PriceSCAN.com is a comprehensive price and product comparison service. Millions of consumers a year have used PriceSCAN.com to bargain hunt. In addition to price comparison, PriceSCAN.com offers objective vendor ratings, a price focused technology blog, user reviews, price trend graphs, and email price target alerts.
