Another validation of the fact that context services are increasingly becoming mainstream

Location Based Services where are you ?

30/04/2009 - by TelecomTV One

It's no surprise that location based services are tipped for greater and greater things.. the question is, who will control them? By Ian Scales.

Location based services for mobiles (and increasingly netbooks and MIDs) are clearly a key enabler for next-generation mobile services - from location-specific advertising, map-search and navigation through to whatever the next step is in social networking: it will probably all rely in part or in full on some sort of underlying geographical positioning service.

But according to researchers, Strategy Analytics, there's going to be a big battle for control and revenues.

Are location services best controlled from the network (and the network operator), the handset (and the handset vendor) or the Internet based service (the Google).

According to Strategy Analytics operators have so far focused on navigation, people locators and 'find the nearest' services, but have struggled to drive broad adoption in any of them.

At the same time Nokia is moving strongly into the area, acquiring several players, including mapping data provider, Navteq. Given its huge market share in handsets, Nokia is clearly in a good place to compete by bringing these capabilities together.

While Google, with its strengthening position in maps and geo apps and its moves into the smartphone market with Android (where GPS is another API on the handset), is also sitting pretty.

Both these threats, from different parts of the forest, are capable of disintermediating operators from the location services value chain, says Strategy Analytics.

In whatever way the power play works itself out, the good news is that a huge market will form as GPS handset ownership and data plan adoption grows with the increasing take-up of smartphones and mobile broadband.

The analysts say growth in location-based service will ensure the current $650 million market will hit $8 billion by 2013 and over 80 per cent of those location revenues will come from location-enabled search and voice-guided navigation applications.