LBS Coming of Age?

location based services

I had a great chat yesterday with the LBS team at Openwave here in California. They read MobHappy and invited me in for an exchange of views while I was here. It’s nice to meet other people who are still true believers in the success of LBS, albeit with a realistic view of the market mixed with their evangelism.
In case you don’t know, Openwave make a lot of the midddleware/enabling technologies that carriers need to deploy LBS - the secret sauce that makes things happen, to employ a cliche common in Silicon Valley.
One very interesting snippet I learned that did surprise me, despite my own evangelism is that this year will see revenue from LBS outstrip investment. This is a really exciting milestone.
My own experience of LBS shows that there’s a lot of scepticism at operator level about the potential, particularly in the UK. There is a feeling that because early experiments didn’t work, future applications won’t either. However, the early stuff tended to polarise around local search - find my nearest ATM, for example - and as I’ve written before, most people spend most of their time in environments where they know this information anyway. And on the odd occasion that they need to know this kind of thing, they’ve forgotten all about that potentially useful application.
As I’ve also written before, the innovation needed to drive non-voice mobile usage forward is unlikely to come from the operators themselves and that’s as true for LBS as for anything. So it’s opportune to read that Berg Insight have published new research into LBS today, based on interviews with 200 people working in this area.
There’s not a lot of surpises in the research, though it’s very useful to have gut feel and snippets of the jigsaw validated by the big picture. However, of most interest was that 35% of operators are looking for “looking for more innovative LBS that really can catch the needs of the end-users” which I find encouraging in itself. Although you have to wonder at the 65% who aren’t looking for this. I wonder what they are looking for? More boring location based services that don’t catch the needs of the end user?
Among the vendors and consultancies interviewed, this figure rose to 48% who were looking for the innovative approach, although again I have to question the sanity of those questioned who didn’t recognise the need to innovate, rather than the same old, same old approach to this market.
The question I always ask at this stage though, is what are these hugely successful, cash-rich, profitable and innovative (in their own way) companies doing to stimulate innovation among the cash and profit poor, struggling entrepreneurs who will invent the applications that will kick start the market. The MoSoSo’s, the virtual graffiti deployers, location gamers and the local file sharing disrupters (to categorise a few of them) who will shape this new market.
I know it’s unlikely to happen, but it won’t stop me suggesting it. If operators diverted 5% of the their massive marketing or R&D budgets to Nurturing Grants for these bright young companies, we’d see a real fast-forward effect that would benefit the whole value chain immeasurably.

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