Mobile Location Based Services, 2009

Use of location-based services (LBS) has seen huge growth since the defense department made its GPS signals available for commercial use in 1993. Now, 15 years later, a wide variety of LBS are available to both consumers and business users. For consumers, typical LBS deployments are designed to increase navigation capabilities and to ensure safety. For enterprise users, location-based services are now a vital part of many businesses’ productivity.

The popularity of these applications is increasing rapidly. For example, 14 percent of the applications downloaded on the Android operating system are location based. More than 600 LBS applications available through the Apple iPhone’s App Store. It is estimated that, in 2007 alone, more than 6 million U.S. consumers paid for LBS applications from mobile operators. This has far outpaced the uptake of location-based services in Europe and other areas of the world.

Within the consumer location-based services arena, services can be divided into three subsections: safety, information and entertainment. There are many applications that fit into one of the three subsections, such as those that allow users to track a child’s location, provide yellow pages-type information and gaming applications. Within the enterprise sector, LBS aids businesses in what has come to be known as mobile resource management (MRM), which refers to the ability to track resources or assets in real-time in order to increase a company’s productivity. Common uses of location-based services for MRM can be broken into three main types: asset tracking, fleet tracking and management, and workforce automation.

Vendors in the location-based services space include traditional telecommunications suppliers, as well as some companies focused solely on providing LBS and location determining technology and solutions. Note that, while some of these companies limit their offerings to only software or only hardware, others provide a more complete, end-to-end solution featuring both components.

This report will profile many of the major LBS vendors, as well as provide details on the technology used to enable LBS applications, barriers and benefits to the uptake of these applications, and provide a forecast for the growth of location based services over the next five years.

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