RedCoal GSM Triangulation in Australia

location based services


Published April 2nd, 2007 in GSM Triangulation
I found this on ITWire:
Finding your location when on the move is big business and has been dominated in the past by GPS. But now there is another technology available in Australia that allows standard mobile phones to be located using a technique called GSM triangulation.

“With the Australian mobile phone market at near saturation, this is big business,” says Ray David, Sales and Marketing Manager of Sydney based wireless innovation company redcoal Pty Ltd which has just launched its own range of GSM location based services.
“Our SimPoint service gives dispatchers and managers of mobile field staff the ability to locate their people by tracking their mobile phones. A simple to use web interface also allows messaging to these mobiles. We think that a lot of small to medium size companies that do not want to invest in GPS hardware and that need to track their people outside of a vehicle will find this attractive”, says David.
“We are also the first company in Australia to provide the development tools that can be used by others to create their own customised location based services,” says David.
Overseas where this technology has been available for years, businesses offering personalised services such as friendfinders, ATM finders and other point of interest locators are garnering significant interest from venture capital organisations.
According to a US survey by In-Stat MDR, 85% of wireless subscribers were interested in accessing location based services. More than half of these were also willing to pay a premium for these features. One conclusion from the study was that location based services held much broader mass-market appeal among wireless subscribers than other wireless data services such as ring tones and mobile games.
ABI Research estimates that the global location based market will grow to $8 billion in 2010, and with 55 percent of the world’s mobile subscribers, much of this growth will be in the Asia Pacific region.
Location based services have been threatening to explode for a while and now GSM triangulation technology makes a new world of consumer and business applications possible.
I’m simply not sure that a heavy investment in triangulation is the way forward when GSM chips in phones are becoming de rigeur. Once the Google phone launches, with Google Maps, I think a strong direction will be taken away from GSM Triangulation. But hey! I’ve been wrong before.

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