Anyone with a working memory will know how long location-based services (LBS) have been touted around the mobile industry as yet another of those optimistically named ‘killer applications’ that would bring yet more cash flooding into the service providers. The sad truth was that most of those early visions were completely unrealisable for sound reasons – both technological and commercial – and, as always, it’s taken a while for the rest of the world to catch up with the dreamers.

That picture has changed dramatically just in the last couple of years, especially in North America, as all the different bits of the complex chain required to support LBS have fallen into place. Simultaneously, new application areas - such as the location-aware social networking service www.gypsii.com.com recently launched by Geocentric - have emerged that make use of location data in original and innovative ways to increase both revenues and service stickiness.

At it’s most elemental, this shift has come about through a rethinking of what location is really all about. Andy Walker, CEO of local information mobile search specialist M-Spatial (www.m-spatial.com) explains, “The early thinking around location was really limited to producing individual linear services heavily focused on one specific application area. That changed in recent years to a perspective on location as being an enabler for a wide range of applications. Now, complementing that, location is seen as a key part of the ‘context’ of a communications transaction – and that has much bigger implications for application designers, mobile operators, users and especially for brands or businesses who want to get even closer to their customers through targeted advertising.”

This is a view echoed by Cristophe Fondin, director business development EMEA for radio infrastructure company Andrew Corporation (www.andrew.com), “You have to look at location as an enhancement to existing service possibilities, rather than an end in itself.”

Drilling down into the different building blocks that make up a location-aware application or service, one of the most important is obviously the technology that actually positions the user. In this context, there have been both winners and losers with, as usual, very early technological and regulatory decisions having a huge impact on the eventual shape of the sector. One of the prime drivers that concentrated the minds of the industry was the announcement by the US FCC in the late 1990s of specific location accuracy standards to allow the emergency services to locate crashed cars. Europe , by contrast, took a far more relaxed approach - at least in the early days - with no direct mandate imposed on operators, just an expectation that emergency location would become enabled as purely commercial location systems took off.

The positioning technology picture now is a lot clearer than it was a few years ago. While the GSM community was largely focused on pretty inaccurate Cell-ID technologies or some variants of an alphabetic stew of solutions that used triangulation, the CDMA community was able to use the far more accurate timing system at the heart of CDMA to increase accuracy. In parallel, satellite GPS solutions shrank dramatically in size and battery demand, leading to the appearance of mass market GPS systems and the use of Enhanced GPS to provide a fast fall-back technology when satellites were out of sight.

“High positioning accuracy was - and remains - very important to enterprises, not just the emergency services,” comments Brian Verano, senior market analyst at positioning technology provider TruePosition (www.trueposition.com). “Service providers now have a very wide range of positioning technologies available and, just as we take a largely agnostic approach to this problem, they’re very often best served by a hybrid solution that can ensure optimum performance under different conditions – such as combining Assisted GPS (A-GPS) with Uplink Time Difference on Arrival (U-TDOA).

On top of this, there are also other developments coming from companies like Seeker Wireless (www.seekerwireless.com) who have developed a high-accuracy SIM-based positioning solution with a specific focus on supporting Home Zone services – the latest battleground for the dual, triple and quad-play service providers. Andrew Grills, general manager at Seeker sees, “many service providers who want to introduce Home-Zone services but recognise that they’re going to face potentially severe revenue leakage problems because of the inaccuracy of current positioning technologies in GSM networks. This seems especially true amongst Eastern European mobile operators who are not at all impressed with current Cell-ID solutions but see that an easily deployable location solution can not only resolve the revenue leakage issue, but also provide the accuracy required for location-centric services supported by brands, shops and businesses.”

So, if that’s the situation at the edge – what’s happening in the centre of the network ?

Here at last the ‘joined-up’ thinking in telecoms that’s characterised the last few years are also starting to bear fruit. Everyone’s familiar enough with the historic limitations of the old ‘silo’ approach to services and supporting IT systems and much work is underway these days to break these down, eliminating much of the traditional separation that there used to be between the OSS, BSS, SDP and switching realms – the last now obviously exemplified by IMS.

In this context, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is increasingly looking like the ‘glue’ of choice to both  bring together - and expose – location information to an increasingly wide range of applications. HP’s Joe Dyoub, global solutions manager and location guru (www.hp.com) , emphasises the success of the SOA approach in getting North American mobile service providers to market quickly and efficiently - but also highlights some pitfalls: “There’s always a danger that implementing a technology like SOA can involve you in far more work and expense than you actually need. When it comes to exposing assets like location to other applications, people often forget that when you abstract data to a common language, you also run the risk of effectively ‘dumbing down’ that data and the interactions that it can drive. This is especially important for location applications where the mobile sector is really having to look to the web applications developer community for solutions – they don’t speak telecom !”

A similar ‘joined-up’ strategy is also being successfully promoted by Microsoft (www.microsoft.com). Microsoft and BT, for example, recently announced the first winner in the Connected Services Sandbox developer competitions with the winner developing a collaborative logistics mash-up to help transportation companies cut costs and streamline logistics operations. The components of the mash-up included MapPoint, Virtual Earth from the Web Services side and authentication, location and SMS information and services from the operator’s side.

Michael Weening, director of communications sector at Microsoft UK believes that approaches like this that can ‘disaggregate services from the complexities of the back end’ have huge potential – especially when it comes to integrating location information with enterprise applications like logistics management. “There’s a definite relationship here with Metcalfe’s Law,” he explains, “as the more devices capable of providing location information - or of running properly integrated applications – the faster value will accrue to all concerned. The mobile operator’s other strategic assets - such as the ability to process micro-payments – also start to be very important in this setting.”

Complementing this too are the appearance of widgets for the mobile handset, an approach recognised by mobile applications company Openwave (www.openwave.com) in their May 2007 announcement of cooperation with SIRF to enable use of these new techniques.

Finally, there’s the issue of the actual geographic information itself. Jack Reinalt, COO of leading geographic information provider Tele Atlas (www.teleatlas.com) sees 3D mapping as providing the next set of important visual cues to users: “As positioning gets more accurate, users want to be able to relate the buildings they see with the map or direction that they’re getting on their devices. By year end, we should have 3D maps available for over 48 European cities alone. Greater detail also translates into more opportunities for users to add their own information to maps – which adds up to greater stickiness for service and application providers.”

But, paralleling the growing success of location also come a number of caveats – as flagged up in the first paragraph. Location might be a vital asset for a service provider’s business plan – but it’s also a highly personal asset to the individual being tracked and one with the potential for abuse by governments, businesses, organised crime and individual nutters. In the UK in 2004, for example, the Mobile Broadband Group (www.mobilebroadbandgroup.com), composed of the main UK mobile operators issued a Code of Practice specifically dealing with personal location issues.

With communications services of all kinds increasingly focusing on an individual’s identity and how they expose that to the outside world, these issues can only grow in importance and sensitivity as Rick Halton, marketing director at subscriber data specialist Apertio (www.apertio.com) eloquently suggests, “Identity is increasing being seen as more than just passing basic credentials but contextual identity. Knowing the users location obviously brings relevance to any service.  But combining this with their availability, privacy, and rights all across many potential identities means that operators stay relevant to their customers needs. This is the utopia, but technical and psychological hurdles remain....”

 PANEL
White label or perish
First time around a lot of exciting and innovative location based services were suggested by many young start-ups hoping their ideas would make them rich and famous. Then the bubble burst and most of those hapless entrepreneurs found themselves neither rich nor famous but looking for jobs.

That didn’t make their ideas any less interesting, however, and some of the cannier ones realised they may still have an opportunity albeit with a lower profile. Take London based Creativity Software (www.creativitysoftware.net). It shuns the limelight preferring to see its work adopt the branding of others but it continues to make a respectable living doing so while many other location based services players are no more.

Network operators and handset makers use Creativity Software’s services to offer their own location based services. Thanks to a deal with internationally respected travel publisher Rough Guides, for example, Creativity Software has allowed Motorola (www.motorola.com) to embed an application in the handsets it ships in Europe offering its customers location aware travel information.

Transport for London (www.tfl.gov.uk), the London bus and rail service overseer, uses Creativity Software applications to reassure parents that letting their children use public transport is safe. They resell a Creativity Software service to parents, which allows them to track the whereabouts of their offspring.

A similar idea applied in a different way allows oil company BP (www.bp.com) to help ensure that staff are safe. A field management application from Creativity Software involves a belt mounted GPS device that keeps track of staff whereabouts and even alerts a control centre when they need assistance.

Yet another Creativity Software application is that of asset tracking - letting the owners of mobile equipment know where it is. National Monitoring uses Creativity Software’s tools to let the owners of expensive cars sleep better at night, secure in the knowledge that they really know where the vehicles are – without having to sleep in them.

 

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