Location Aware Mobile Application Services
Location Based Services Market
Location based services are the center of great attention in both the Internet and wireless telecommunications market. Until recently, wireless location services have been seen as attractive only to highly specialized niche uses, such as operator assisted navigation systems and emergency response systems. However, the FCC regulations has created a new market for enhance location services. This mandate requires services providers to put in place an infrastructure that provide emergency service, in addition to a new class of chargeable location based services.
According to the Strategis Group, a leading telecommunications Research firm, the market for location based services is expected to generate $4 billion a year in annual service revenue. Many vendors (Nokia, Ericsson, and Motorola) are in trials with service provider such as GTE, Bell Atlantic Mobile, US West, Vodaphone, AT&T among others. For and Internet portals and large organizations, this class of service provides an opportunity to deliver content to users via standard IP networks. As vendors and service providers put their infrastructure in place over the next 24 months, the levels of expenditures in hardware, software, radio and GPS technology, and content will easily exceed $10 billion.
Service Types
The separation of services from the telecom networks will lead to an establishment of an open, IP based service environment. In the initial phase it will primarily be datacom services which are implemented in this IP environment. However, soon technologies such as voice over IP will enable multimedia messaging services and real time call control services to be implemented in an open, IP based service environment. The first generation of location based services can roughly be divided into five categories:
- Safety Services: These include emergency and vehicle support services. These services are requested by a user in the event of an emergency, or it may be initiated automatically, for example when a car breaks down. These type of services can expect to gain a high market acceptance due to the general concern of the public for the personal security. However, as noted above FCC regulations are driving the penetration of these services, and will be one of the first class of services rolled out over the coming 12 months.
- Tracking Services: These services include vehicle tracking, logistic systems, fleet management, and people tracking services. Today, many of these services are offered by legacy, mobile data system. However, with the general availability of CDMA and GSM wireless capability, it is likely that many of these services will be merged into the digital wireless networks.
- Information Services: These 411 type services comprise a vast area of applications. Some of the services that first come to mind includes traffic information, navigation assistance, yellow pages, travel/tourism services, etc. Many of these information are completely automated, while others are intermediated by a live operator.
- Billing Services: Such services offers the possibility to offer differentiated charging depending on a subscriber’s location. Typical example can be home zone services, promotional billing as part of a corporate arrangement such as VPN etc.
- Mobile Web Portal Services: This type of service enables users with a new class of WAP enabled phones to access the Web. For example, “location aware” devices will combine some of the first 3 services above to deliver “local” news, weather, and traffic information determined by location of device – all provided through an icon-based GUI. Users will be able to access favorite Web thereby extending the reach of the Web beyond desktop.
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