Every month, WIP will choose a theme - a technology, vertical market or a combination of both. WIP members who reflect that theme will be featured, (it's based on key words they have chosen for their WIPConnector profile.)

LBS as Primary Word Choice:

Argyll Telecom (Dunoon, Scotland) UK market leader in wireless monitoring solutions applied to the management of human resources, and monitoring of individual health, safety and wellbeing.

BitFlash (Open Text) (Ottawa, Canada) Total-solution provider of Mobile SVG-based technologies.

GPS Industries (Vancouver, Canada) GPS and Wi-Fi business solutions for the Golf industry.

Searchquest Inc. (California, USA) Mobile 2.0 Map Mashup Location-Based GPS Search.

CityDazz Interactive (Vancouver, Canada) The best way to find local, relevant and personalized info on your mobile phone.

RX Networks (Vancouver, Canada)

Trisent Communications (Dunfermline, Scotland) Proprietary technology for automatic location tracking of cellular phones, vehicles and assets.

LBS as Secondary Word Choice:

ARCchart (London, England) Wireless research and consulting firm.

Bell Canada (Ottawa, Canada) Bell Canada is the country's largest telecommunications and service provider.

Contec Innovations (Coquitlam, Canada) Leading provider of Service Delivery solutions to operators and service providers.

GetMyData Inc. (Ottawa, Canada) Enabling wireless access to personal data via any web-enabled device.

Island Communications (Stirling, Scotland) Supplier of Wireless Data Solutions and CraftAlert Safety at Sea system.

Mobile Acuity Limited (Edinburgh, Scotland) Integrates picture messaging into mobile marketing campaigns and mobile media applications.

WIP Partners with wireless organizations around the world. Every month we will feature one of their members online and in the newsletter. Ask your organization to partner with WIP today!

Featured Partner Members for September:

MX Alliance features Sysnet
Award winning Nokia Pro Forum partner, IBM Premier Business Partner and leading partner with Microsoft, Vodafone, Anoto and Xerox.

Ottawa Wireless Cluster features Waypoint Information Technology.
Hosted online mapping for applications including capacity planning for cellular coverage areas.

WINBC features Upside Wireless.
Products and services that enable global communication using mobile messaging.

Find out more about one of the hottest and most innovative mobile markets. The Korea Technology Tour (KTT) is a 1-week guided tour for western executives, consisting of over 15 meetings, on-site visits and product demos with leading Korean mobile operators, content and solutions providers. WIP Members can save 15% on the cost. Find out more about the tour.

WIP Members to Date: 160

Countries represented: Canada, US, Scotland, England, Ukraine, India, Spain, Germany

?What do you think of LBS?? I asked my friend Joanne. Aged 27, she's a qualified social worker and just this weekend she got engaged to long term boyfriend Ben.

?What's that?? she replied, fiddling with her top of range handset.

?Er, you know, location based services?? She stares at me for a moment and I know she's about to rail at me for speaking in tech geek jargon with her, so I interject, ?You know, Find My Nearest??

Blank look. We're sat at a table in one of the finer restaurants Chelmsford has to offer. One or two people from other nearby tables had looked over when I turned geek for a few moments.

Joanne is smart, good looking and doesn't do geek. I was testing, you see. I didn't think she'd care one jot about LBS - but I harboured a secret idea that her pupils would enlarge and her head involuntarily nod slightly at the mention of 'find my nearest'. Not a bit of it.

?Find my nearest - you know, like a cashpoint,? I ask, slightly desperate now. At last a flicker of recognition. ?Oh that yeah. It's crap and it costs money,? she immediately replies.

?You've never used it?? I respond. ?Once, and then it wanted almost three quid off me before you could do anything!?

A simple story, but I?m sure this type of response to LBS would be a fairly typical reaction from most mobile users.

I find it absolutely fascinating observing the 200 mile wide difference between what we in the mobile industry are told by adverts, CEO pitches and fancy press releases - and the cold reality for the consumer.

Joanne knows - after some prodding - that you can locate a taxi firm, cash point or even bring up a pretty basic map using your mobile. But she dismissed an entire subset of the mobile industry the moment her service provider wanted £2.50 a month for it. Too expensive ? and this coming from someone who spends hundreds a month on texting.

If, however, you could tell her where each of her friends were, right now - it's a done deal. She'll pay for that. She'll pay to be able to locate hot single guys in the town centre pubs too. Well, not any more as she's engaged - but -- please, click here to locate your cashpoint? She's not interested. Neither are the rest of us. It's a super ancillary service, but that?s not what LBS is about. It's about connecting people in unique and valuable ways.

Obviously a few people are using the archaic LBS services. Another friend Tom was a frequent LBS user. His job requires him to frequently visit 2-3 cities a week, so he was really excited at the prospect of using LBS for directions. ?But the maps were useless and the poor accuracy really annoyed me. The service never once met my expectations, irrespective of all the 25p transactions I made,? he recalls. He kept hoping for it to be better, each time and although now he's swapped to another network, he doesn't bother with LBS.

What right minded individual wants to blow £2.50 a month (that's equal to 20 text messages!) to look up maps or nearby cash points? Is this really the pinnacle - the absolute best - that our billion pound operators can dream up? Clearly, it is. It's just not good enough.

There's a world of consumers absolutely obsessed with using location based services - but they just don't know it, yet. I'm not interested in the mechanics or the technical challenges. Fix the billing mechanism. Leave it to the industry?s entrepreneurs to meet the burgeoning untapped demand for LBS. Stop putting everyone off with neolithic 10p a lookup charges (3p a lookup doesn't work, neither does 1p) Make it a small, fixed monthly fee, say £400 a month, and these entrepreneurs will enter the market and start developing magnificently innovative location based services. Make the economics work for the consumer and we're away.

The further musings of Ewan MacLeod can be found at SMS Text News.

My first exposure the LBS industry was some time ago when I was working for a company who had developed a new method to improve the accuracy of deriving the position of a mobile phone. Back then we thought we were on to a winner ? suddenly every mobile phone would become a highly accurate tracking device, opening up a huge range of lucrative services for the mobile operators and creating a great business for the company.

Fast forward to 2006 and it?s amazing how many of the services we talked up then are still stuck in the starting blocks. There?s no doubt the technology has improved dramatically in performance and cost over that time, lowering the cost and availability of devices and applications.

Location based advertising was the really sexy application that got people excited then and still does now, but it would appear that there might still be a big resistance from consumers to revealing their exact location (most people don?t seem to know that their mobile operator already has this information available). But, with the growth of mobile marketing using SMS, I believe consumers will start to become more comfortable using their mobile as an interactive communication channel. That should drive adoption of marketing and advertising where location is a critical element.

This should drive adoption of other ?location aware? applications ? location based games and tourism applications are a couple of interesting area. The area we completely overlooked ? telematics ? is the market segment that has gained real traction and seen the largest growth.

Just recently, I was waiting at home to have our gas boiler serviced and as usual they were late! The phone rang and it was the service company letting me know that the service engineer would be with me in ten minutes, since they knew exactly where he was and they knew where he should have been.

From fleet tracking to optimizing human assets, LBS has really made a huge impact across a huge number of industries and I think we have only just scratched the surface of what is possible. For example, a UK insurance company is looking at how they might use LBS to provide their customers car insurance based on where they drive.

Clearly Location Based Services have not lost their way, like all great technologies they have just taken longer to get to where we thought they might be.

The WIP Editor

WIP spoke to Neil Knusden, chair at Ottawa Wireless Cluster to get his thoughts on the LBS market.

Q: What?s your current assessment of the LBS market?

A: As with all new technologies, LBS suffers from the same problems: lack of standards, too many competing visions, and no way to focus the technology down to the requirements of individual markets. That said, on board mapping seems to be taking off and is gaining acceptance as the cost comes down and both the ease of use and accuracy go up. Also, acceptance in general is going up, and this will help both the installed base and the universe of people who will come to expect LBS as the norm.

Q: What are some of the big challenges for the LBS industry?

A: Too often LBS and its myriad of variants are sold as "dots on a map". However, for many (most?) commercial applications this is the sizzle that sells but it is not what people need. Until a broad, easily adapted platform arrives that addresses on board wireless, computing, sensor input and back end reporting of the results the first three put into the database, individual vertical markets are going to demand customization. This means smaller market segments but better opportunities for smaller, more nimble companies. Look at @road in field service, AirIQ in rental vehicles, Digital Dispatch in taxi dispatch to name a few I can think of off hand.

The balance between the wireless backhaul technology used and the cost of the link compared to the ROI of the application will also present challenges for some time to come as prices have come down somewhat but not enough to feed all the mouths in the food chain. Everyone agrees that the end user will pay $20/mo for service X, but everyone servicing that market wants $15 for themselves (for example hardware lease, airtime, software app, installation and maintenance, backend/web ASP, etc, etc). The last challenge related to this is the over the air updating of maps (especially with regard to airtime).

Q: Where are the big opportunities?

A: Wait 10 years and consolidate all the small companies I predict are going to be created from the question above. But seriously, I think a few areas that offer real opportunities will be mixed technology backhaul with real-time tracking of high priority data points where the bulk data is downloaded when the vehicle returns to the yard and smart on-board navigation in many different forms. Mesh networks that simply use proximity to connect to nearby devices and so automatically enable them for the particular service being provided, for example emergency communication in a several block area, localized ads which don't need to know your location to the nearest meter, and communication for specialty events, for example selling downloaded music at a special price to everyone at the concert.