Mobile LBS Market

Presented at the LIAISON-ISHTAR Workshop in September of this year, Mobile LBS Market by C. Desiniotis, J. G. Markoulidakis from Vodafone, and J-Fr Gaillet from NAVTEQ presents the reasons for the low adoption of LBS during the past years as well as the drivers that are expected to push the still emerging LBS market in the near future.

The authros first define the different aspects of positioning techniques such as access technology, measurement, terminal vs. network based, indoor vs. outdoor, and software/hardware implications. Positioning techniques performance can be evaluated using criteria such as accuracy, latency, availability, reliability and applicability. In fact, the achieved positioning accuracy is closely related to the implementation costs.

More interesting, they provide a classification of 18 mass-market LBS applications with their different needs in terms of required quality of service (accuracy, integrity, indoor coverage, etc.) and the different groups of users they address

The reasons why LBS is not yet the “killer application” in wireless communications are a combination of reduced take-up of mobile data services as a whole, and low take-up specifically of mobile LBS. Some of the most important reasons responsible for this turn are summarized as follows:

• Poor tracking performance
• Inherent customer perception issues
• Low throughput mobile networks
• Significant investment required
• User adoption requires time
• Not well defined business models
• Unfriendly User Interfaces

They conclude that:

Technology hype and low adoption of the existing model of LBS (first wave of services) lead the market to rationalise and refocus. It is evident that users lacked of interest in the existing offer during the past years. The expectations for the second wave of LBS should thus be more conservative in terms of the market growth.

Relation to my thesis: The paper concurs with the many discussions with Nicolas about the failed state of LBS and the expectations of a second wave (i.e. “how LBS failed as a technology-driven product but how it was a success in the dissemination of such applications in people’s mind”). I am not sure the “drivers” mentioned in this papers are the key for the take-off of a second wave of LBS. Indeed, users still do not seem to be in the center of preoccupation of LBS practitioners and analysts.

In my work, I acknowledge poor tracking performance and low throughput mobile networks as potential initiator of issues on the usability of a location-aware application. However, I do not consider that improvements in positioning techniques and data communication as the unique key factors for a usable application. I investigate the management and integration of the technological constraints in the design of the system.