SiRF Technology (SIRF), developer of semiconductor and software products that are designed to enable location awareness in GPS, is one of the companies that I am most excited about. SiRF has two advantages over its competitors. The first is that their GPS-only chips are just plain better -- faster, more accurate and less likely to lock-up. That used to be a much bigger advantage, but other companies have narrowed (but not closed) the gap.

SiRF's second advantage is that they can combine GPS with a dedicated processor, thanks to a couple of recent acquisitions, and that lets them provide a highly-integrated solution to companies that make products where GPS is a feature, not the main purpose of the device. Of course, the big volume product here is cell phones, but there are many other products that can use GPS as a feature. So, although the transition to high-volume products using an integrated GPS approach raises some risks, it also dramatically expands the company's total available market.