Location Matters

location based services

Over the past few years I’ve been following the LBS (location based services) industry. This all started when I was doing a little startup called Dashfly and we entered a contest sponsored by Nokia for LBS. The contest was simple, come up with a legitimate LBS idea and Nokia would provide the funding to get it implemented. We came up with a pretty elaborate idea, but I’ll leave that story for another day.
LBS has come a long way, but there’s still a lot of things that need to be figured out. I would say one of the biggest hurdles is the adoption of GPS in mobile devices. This is not only a hardware issue, but software as well. Carriers generally know a cell phone’s location based on a cell id, but this is generally not exposed to developers. I can understand this since consumers are concerned about “Big Brother” watching over them. Yet there are legitimate businesses and developers (like myself) that want to build truly useful and engaging applications centered around location.
Retrieving location from a mobile device comes in different flavors, but the approach can be considered very fragmented. This is something I struggled with in the past when writing mobile software. Here’s a brief list:
1. Java’s location API (JSR 179)2. Bluetooth GPS3. Assisted GPS (AGPS)4. Location based on cell id5. Location using WiFi and other beacons
I don’t have time to go into detail with each approach, but the issues to consider are availability, accuracy, time to fix, coverage, and cost. Needless to say this isn’t a simple problem to solve and hardware manufacturers, carriers, software companies, and developers are doing their best to come up with creative solutions.
At SensorLogic (where I’m currently employed) we’ve seen the value in location for businsess applications. This can consist of route optimization for fleets, knowing if mobile assets are in or out of a designated area, and much more. There’s virtually an unlimited number of uses for location, but the same problem still exists: the device. GPS is fairly common in a lot of devices we work with, but it’s by no means standard. The adoption rate of LBS in the enterprise market seems to be taking on quicker than at the business level. I think the main reason is that there’s less of a security risk in tracking your fleet versus tracking a child. At least that’s my perspective.
I still think there’s an opportunity (and I see quite a few companies onto it) to tie a user’s location to someting important to them. I would love to see where all my friends are right now or find great local mexican restaurants as recommended by my friends…..and do this from my mobile device.
With all this being said I’m going to start posting more about LBS and why “Location Matters” in the coming weeks. I want to cover some of the technology, applications, hardware, and see how we can dream up the next killer LBS idea.