My review of some LBS services
My Favorite LBS Services
This is the big travel weekend, so a short review of my three favorite LBS services seems in order. In the New York metro 
area there are four main destinations, each with its unique lingo. For the Labor Day weekend people leave “The City” and go either “Upstate” (which for City dwellers is anywhere that is more than 1 mile north of the Bronx!), “Out to the Island” (which is what you say if you go to Long Island but don’t have a place in the Hamptons), “Down the Shore” (that’s the Jersey shore), or “in the mountains” (either the Poconos or Catskills – Since there are no coal miners in the city – the phrase “in the mountains is curious)
For travel directions it is hard to beat the Verizon navigator service for ease of use and value. I used to carry a handheld Garmin unit (cost ~$500, plus map updates). It worked fine, but was one more item to carry. I also had to spend extra money on map updates and remember to download the right detail maps
before I went on a trip. For the VZW Navigator feature, I pay about $10/month and the maps and local details are all network based. The voice and map directions are great and they have saved me several times (even walking in “The City”). The cost has a breakeven of over 4 years with the purchase of a standalone unit. It is a good value.
Another feature that I have long trumpeted as the first killer LBS app is rolling out as VZW Chaperone service. This is the long awaited kid finer service. You can locate your kids on a map and get an alert if they leave a specific area. This is a great feature for the pre-teen age group.
Lastly, once you reach your destination you will need to look up restaurants, movies and other local services. My choice for that service is the still un-matched Vindigo service. Vindigo has been 
around seemingly since the dinosaurs roamed the earth (in Internet time). It is still a great service, albeit you need to know where you are since it does not have LBS hooks with the phone. For destination travel (pleasure or business) it still works well for finding that seafood place or reading a review of a movie before you suggest it to your fellow vacationers. It even can provide you directions and traffic conditions along the way. If this service ever integrated true LBS location it would rock.
For this weekend I will be going to none of these classic destinations. Instead I will enjoy a long “Honey –do” weekend. Have a good long weekend!
Location Based Services – Ready for Primetime?
The requirements for wireless 911 location services seemed to be the necessary catalyst for infrastructure and device capabilities. Despite the hype the rollout has been disappointing.
Why?
Maybe an analogy to the SMS market of the late 1990’s can provide some clues.
SMS took off as a service when three major events happened. First , and most importantly was inter- carrier cooperation and transport of SMS; Secondly, the emergence of SMS applications beyond user-to-user testing (such as Upoc, text alerts, banking, etc), and lastly a value chain that includes market and connectivity enablers such as mobile marketing firms and SMS aggregators.
applications that go beyond driving directions and kid finder services. (More on those in later blog). There are, of course, privacy concerns with providing location information to third party application and content providers. The ability to turn location sourcing on and off on the handset should have helped ease the fears. The ability for carriers and/or consumers to blacklist LBS service providers that misused the information would also be necessary.
It seems as though the technology, policy and legal concerns should be easily overcome. So, I ask again, why have these services not developed in a timely manner?
One possible depressing conclusion might be that there may not be the pend-up depend for LBS services that many of us in the wireless industry have predicted and assumed to exist. While I have to acknowledge this as a possibility – I am still strongly in the pro-LBS camp.
Another possible reason is that the policy and legal issues have strangled the market of LBS. Wireless Carriers are conservative by nature (and necessity) and are likely to move at a “prudent” speed for such a service. Since there is real economic incentive to deploy services that increase ARPU, I want to believe, also, that this is not the case. We are seeing lots of navigation and enterprise applications being introduced throughout the market.
Therefore, that leaves the lack of a developed cross-carrier LBS value chain that enables innovative application providers to capitalize and a well-oiled economic and technological model.
Will this model come from within the wireless carrier business model, or outside? It is possible that in handsets will have the capability to provide GPS information over a data channel that is outside of the carriers’ control. How might that business model look for the industry at large?
Markets and technology do have a way of emerging, either as a controlled introduction from within the existing value chains, or as a disruptive technology that supplants the existing market. It will be interesting to watch which path LBS services take.
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