What Are Location Services?

Location Services are added value services that depend on a mobile user’s geographic position. 

Why Are They Important?

Location Services are important in the effort to continually provide valuable and personalised services to mobile users to increase penetration, usage and loyalty.  Local and personal information based on user positioning will help the market:

§         Increase security

§         Access timely local information

§         Obtain personalised information

§         Increase efficiency of time and distribution of services

 

Operators will increase customer loyalty, traffic and consequently revenues as a result of astute investment of these services.  The public will benefit not only from access to more personalised services but increasing their safety in the mobile world.  Governments will be able to take advantage of location services to increase the efficiency of emergency deployment and address urban congestion issues. 

 

SignalSoft Corporation estimates the world-wide market for location based services will reach $20 billion by 2005.  Strategy Analytics estimates this is a $9 billion service opportunity in Western Europe by 2005.  Durlacher Research estimates that 15% of total mobile sales will be location based services by 2003.

How Will They Be Used?

The initial applications foreseen for wireless location services are:

 What Are the Technical Issues?

§        Locating the Mobile Device – There is a need to support multiple Location Determination Technologies (LDT) and applications.  An integrated solution should support many types of available LDT technologies such as Cell ID, AOA, TDOA, GPS, and TOA.

§        Managing the Location Estimates – There is a need for a Location Manager (LM) or gateway that will aggregate the location estimates for the mobile device from the various LDT’s, compute the user location and estimate the certainty of that location before being forwarded to the application.

§         Integration of Location Information to Content and Distribution to User – Proper location services solutions need to provide interfaces which translate location results to user applications, integrate with content providers and provision query results to MAP servers, clients and databases.

§        Need to Offer Multiple Invocation and Delivery Options – A location services solution must provide multiple invocation (or request) options such as SS7 or XML and delivery options such as voice, data and voice/data based on user requirements.

§       Improvement of User Interface at the Handset – This combination of location and content is a big driver for the handset manufacturers to deliver easy to use interfaces at the handset for mapping, video whilst providing response time appropriate for a mobile society.

§       Investment for the Operators Is Larger Than the Software Requirements – Effective use of this technology extends beyond the investment in location services software.  There will be an increased need to profile customers, customer data base management now including location information, data mining and integration to existing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to map content (or solution) to the one-to-one market.

Conclusion

The success of mobile commerce depends also on the delivery of attractive service packages that are personalised to the individual with easy to use terminals at the right price.  Thought must be put into the integration of technologies and delivery meaning a close working relationship between engineering, information technology, marketing and governing concerns.

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