Damien Saunders

Summary: Location Based Services (LBS) were thought to be a killer app for 3G, next is the GPS chip in your phone. What mobile and location services are there right now?

Some of us still remember the early days when 3G business cases were built on the success of LBS’s – everyone was going to make a killing. By far the best ‘LBS’ service on any portal are:

1. live train timetables (is my train on time)
2. traffic cameras (where is that jam)
3. mobile operator concierge service (for those unusal location requests)

So does throwing a GPS chip in a phone help you? If I’m lost will I ask someone? want a map? or fiddle my way around on a small screen? Customers will always do what seems most natural – the path of least resistance.

Having tried Google Maps on the mobile (I knew I was on the right street but not which intersection) a small map can help you … the same can’t be said when you’re driving your car. W2Forum addict Graham Brown, comments that a specific solution for navigation in this case is the way to go.

There are several crossover location-based mobile products out in beta or publicly available:

1. Semacode or QR Codes – these are 2D barcodes geotagging on landmarks / points of historic interest which can link back to a wiki or website. Good idea for tourists wanting more information while out and about.

2. NFC / radio tags not only for micropayments like the London Tube Oyster Card or FOMA in Japan. Radio tags are being used to track luggage in Hong Kong Airport, food shipments in the UK and parcels. So why not use your mobile to check if that parcel got delivered?

3. Public WIFI networks – there has been talk for sometime about public free wifi. More a utopian’s dream than a possible reality allowing you to move around a city and use ’spare’ wifi capacity on peoples routers. Some examples are projects setup to provide streaming music over wifi to anyone who knows where to listen in to.

I’m sure there are many more projects in the LBS space – even a few years ago the idea of a cheap GPS box that was affordable to everyone was a pipedream .. so what will be tomorrows reality?

You might have begun to think I had dropped off the blogosphere. You might be right … a good blog has to be kept updated daily and have something new. I started this when I had a lot of spare time and was looking to go back to contracting. It’s proved very useful.

I’m actually off to Turkey for 6 months for work, but hope in between all of that to find the time to get this going again.  So keep in touch … Damien

Summary: Operators are competing with large bundles of ‘free’ text messages. This pricing prevents text over IP or other apps taking off, but there is still a long way to go to grow data usage.

There is still alot of work to be done to grow data usage across the business and consumer base. One of the challenges is working out pricing. In Ireland, they are trialling €49 per month unlimited plan. In T-mobile UK they have a £7.50 unlimited data plan but services like Skype are barred.

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