Mobile 2.0: Addicted to LBS
by Tarek Abu-Esber
If you’ve read any articles about the Future of Mobile then the chances are Location Based Services (LBS) got heavy billing. These days LBS has become a real industry buzz-word with more and more GPS enabled devices hitting the market and a plethora of new LBS services going live.
The user scenarios are pretty compelling: be able to know where your friends are, meet new people in your immediate area, get search information based on where you’re located, Geo-Tag your content so you can map where it was taken and many others being dreamed up.
In fact the future of mobile LBS was so pervasive that Google used it as a main components in their Android platform. It should come as no surprise then that when the top 50 entries to Googles Android Developer Challenge were revealed a large portion had used location in some way.
The pattern was also evident when a group of students at MIT handed in their projects which were created using Google’s Open mobile platform. Their professor had asked them to come up with the kind of Mobile Service they would like to use in the future and to then try and build it for Android devices. Again LBS was the most common type of service with the students using location information to determine various phone settings like ring-type or call barring and to deliver reminders (e.g. reminds you to buy milk if it detects that you’re near a store) as well as other useful features.
And the pattern isn’t unique to Android. When Apple announced the iPhone SDK they also announced that VC firm Kleiner Perkins were setting up a $100 Million iFund to invest in companies building applications for the iPhone. At the end of May the first two companies that had been chosen were announced and Whrrl, an LBS application, was one of them.
Apple themselves had acknowledged the importance of LBS when they added location tracking software in an firmware update for the original iPhone which identified the users location using cell towers and WiFi hotspots. This trend continued when they added Assisted-GPS to the iPhone 3G which was announced last week and will be available in July. The mapping application will take advantage of the AGPS and iPhone developers can too, so we should be seeing just as many iPhone LBS applications as on Android.
And then there’s Nokia who’ve probably put more GPS enabled handsets in the hands of customers than any other manufacturer. GPS support has become a staple in their N-Series Symbian devices and from this week the same is also true of their E-Series enterprise handsets. Nokia have driven users to take advantage of that hardware by releasing a couple of free LBS applications for S60 users, both of which have been hugely successful.
Nokia Maps, which was originally a free add-on and now comes pre-installed every Nokia S60 handset, and Nokia Sports Tracker have been downloaded by millions of users whose feedback has been used to improve the products over the last few months. In fact Nokia Sports tracker, originally used to track your performance while exercising, proved so successful and was used in so many diverse ways that users dubbed it Life-Tracker.
So in 2008 the hardware is starting to become common place with every major handset manufacturer shipping GPS enabled devices. We’re also seeing the handset manufacturers and OS producers starting to make LBS software available. The foundations are being set and by the looks of things the developers have taken notice. Will 2009 be dubbed “The Year of LBS”? I certainly hope so and I can’t wait to see what the industry comes up with.
