A New Era for LBS in the Enterprise - Articles: "Location-based services (LBS) have resurged remarkably over this last year throughout the North American market. For over three years, location pioneers Bell Mobility and Nextel were alone in offering high precision (read GPS-based) services to their data customers. Then, last May, the silence was broken when Sprint PCS launched the Business Mobility Framework, offering location to its enterprise customers. This was quickly followed up with consumer A-GPS in September. Now with less than three weeks left in 2005 it looks as if Verizon Wireless may launch this year as well. As for GSM, SUPL (secure user plane) is finally an Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) standard, and infrastructure vendors are scrambling to line up handset manufacturers to put A-GPS onto Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) and Wideband CDMA (W-CDMA) networks.

Three Trends Are Emerging
OK, so LBS is back, but what are the services? As discussed in a recent article in Directions Magazine, mobile workforce management is a key area. The use of relatively inexpensive mobile handsets, leveraging embedded A-GPS technology and the cellular data network, to replace traditional dedicated in-car systems has led to a revolution in the fleet management and asset tracking space. By opening A-GPS APIs to 3rd party application partners, Nextel has paved the way for a plethora of lower-cost enterprise tracking solutions. Carriers are now offering carrier-branded tracking solutions to their enterprise customers, such as the Sprint Precision Locator, launched in August. These applications can dramatically extend the value offered to customers by integrating dispatch and job control features, as well as navigation and route optimization capabilities. In this way they can do more than just eat away at the low end of the "