US LBS market forecast to grow by 89 percent by end-2010


United States – US location-based services (LBS) business market is forecast to grow from 582,000 to 1.1 million subscribed devices by end-2010, reports In-Stat.
Location-enabled enterprise applications constitute a small but important segment of the market for mobile IT applications. These include fleet management/dispatch, workforce and sales force management and a variety of public sector location applications.
According to In-Stat, the forecast depends on how carriers and applications vendors will market these applications and how to structure the billing relationship. The availability of handsets that are compatible with location-based services is a key factor that depends on marketing and expenditure decisions by carriers.
The largest market is legacy black box applications, which use vehicle-mounted devices, adds In-Stat. The use of cellular handsets equipped with Assisted-Global Position System (A-GPS) chipsets is an emerging market.
Until mid-2005, only Nextel offers handsets that provide an application execution environment (Java) and GPS data to the applications.