Nokia Conversations on location services:

"Fact is, location-based services (LBS) aren't a hollow promise anymore, with the proliferation of GPS, advanced mapping and fast mobile Internet connection speeds."

To my mind, it's the loosening of the operators grip on location data which has led to a growth in LBS applications over the last year. This has happened in a few ways:

1. GPS is commoditising, just like cameras did. It moves control over location data from the operator to the customer (not a bad thing in itself), and removes the pricing structures (10p per-lookup here in the UK) which operators levied before;
2. Lots of organisations (most visibly Google and Apple) are doing just-good-enough LBS using cell IDs, building their own cell-ID-to-location databases. Again - the operator is routed around in this world; they might have access to more accurate location of their customers, but the price for this incremental accuracy is evidently not worth the price being charged for it;

After a few months using an iPhone or an N82, the idea of a static map which can't tell you where you are already seems oddly quaint.

Comments

[Max]

Do you think carriers will open up their networks so that content providers can can easily access location information cross carriers? Seems there is a need for someone to aggregate location information to make it easy for content providers to create cross carrier applications. Thoughts? Thx

[Tom Hume]

My take would be that GPS or open cell-ID are sucking the value of location information away from carriers - to the extent that even if they open up now, there will be alternatives which are low or zero cost and widely adopted.

[Max]

Thanks for the response. Then why do companies like Loopt or in Europe, Sniff have to negotiate separately with each carrier to access their location information?

[Tom Hume]

Max - perhaps because they're relying on getting this information from operators? The thrust of my post is that whilst this used to be the only way to get location information, over the last year GPS bundled onto handsets and third parties mapping cell IDs to lat/long mean that this will increasingly be unnecessary.