At the very least, I'd love to be able to put my handheld GPS receiver into a low-power "track-only" mode for the times when I'm not actually checking my coordinates. This would also be a nice thing to have integrated into fitness gadgets given that it wouldn't require massively increasing battery size.
If I'm running, or plotting a path in general, I don't need the GPS immediately. I think instantaneous GPS is mostly used for navigational and augmented reality purposes.
So, I could see there being some consumer uses for it, if you could demonstrate that the power saving was worth the wait.
Yes, for products we usually think of us consumer GPS products such as phones and navigation units this won't change much--unless you're willing to listen to your navigation unit's voice yelling at you to make a U-turn onto that road you drove by four hours ago.
On the other hand, this will open up new uses for GPS and potentially let you utilize it in a range of applications that just need to record time/position instead of immediately report it to an app/user. In exchange for lack of immediacy, users acquire higher fidelity data. I'm expecting to see this be more relevant in scientific fields than consumer electronics.
But for a lot of purposes – e.g. tracking the locations of animal migration, this could be a huge development.
This is where it would really come into its own. From what I've worked out in the past, best-case for battery life today for trackers is to record a coordinate roughly every 4 hours and sleep. Longer than 4 hours, and you have to do a cold lock, which as discussed takes significantly longer. With my GPS unit, this translated to around 3-6 months of battery life with 1000mAh capacity, depending on how good you are at optimizing power.
Kickstarter received Venture funding from USV (Fred Wilson et al). Since Non-profits don't generally have shareholders I would assume this means that Kickstarter is a For-profit corporation.
The viability of this seems tied to how long 'later' is. Most consumer uses of GPS require quick response times or you'll see a huge dropoff in usage.