The Location Based Services (LBS) market is growing quickly. One report expects the market segment in the US to grow 43.1 percent over the period from 2008-2012. That number actually seems low when you think about the possibilities of LBS applications. In fact, Juniper Research says that the LBS market will top $12 billion by 2014.
LBS combines mobile handset technology with GPS location information. Because increasingly more handsets are GPS enabled, this segment is really beginning to take off. LBS applications typically are information and entertainment solutions. Based on your current location, LBS applications are able to search and find specific types of information. Examples might include finding information on the nearest stores, businesses or restaurants. Applications could provide walking or driving directions, historical information about the area where you are, or social information via message and photo tags associated with your location that were left by others.
Google has jumped aboard. Everyone is familiar with Google maps. But Google also offers the mobile application Latitude, a PC or mobile app that let’s you see on a map where your friends are. Twitter and Google Buzz support geo-tagging your message with location information. Google has also recently been awarded a patent on the concept of serving up ads to mobile users based on their current location.
Consumer-based geo-location applications are popping up everywhere. These include services like foursquare, gowalla, Loopt, and Rummble. Incumbent social media players like Facebook, LinkedIn and Yelp are scrambling to ad LBS features.
It will be interesting to see if LBS grows a counterpart in business applications too. Businesses already are familiar with location-based application involving RFID and GPS for logistics operations. But in those applications things rather than people are being tracked. It might be an interesting add-on to a CRM system that shows a sales rep visiting a customer, or to see where your team members currently are, or to see the location of attendees to a webinar. On it’s own, LBS doesn’t seem rich enough to survive as a standalone application, but as a feature, it seems to be a useful add-on.
