Location Based Services Start Now
Electronic mapping, when combined with GPS satellite (or similar) navigation, is already a pretty good business. It’s hardly surprising - this technology is incredibly useful. For example, barely a day passes where I don’t use my in-car GPS sat nav. And yet, the key players, are only just scratching the surface of what could be done with this kind of technology. The big, essentially untapped, opportunity is in services, particularly mobile location-based services (LBS) e.g. see just one opportunity. However, LBS has been slow to take off; and for a while now, the big question has been - when will the major players start to really invest in LBS?
Today, we have the answer. Right now. Nokia has just made a huge strategic move in LBS by acquiring one of the world’s two leading electronic mapping companies, NAVTEQ (the other big player is Tele Atlas, which is being acquired by TomTom for $2B). Nokia is paying $8B dollars in cash for NAVTEQ.
This is a huge statement of intent on the part of Nokia: it’s the company’s largest ever acquisition. What exactly is the statement? It’s pretty clear: Nokia sees services as the mechanism by which they will grow their business.
This move puts the tech industry in a rather interesting position. As of today, there aren’t any major independent mapping companies left. It wouldn’t be a surprise to see some hostile bids for both Tele Atlas and NAVTEQ as competitors scramble to digest the implications of what Nokia (and TomTom) are doing…
Asam Bashir wrote:
Problem with LBS in the future though, in my mind, would be LBS spam. Can you imagine walking past a series of ads and all of them spamming you with content that you don’t want. For some reason I always start thinking about this when thinking of ideas for LBS. What mechanisms need to be in place to stop LBS spam, if it’s done wrong, people will be put off by the technology before it even has a chance to mature…
Posted 02 Oct 2007 at 4:19 pm ¶
simon wrote:
Yes - anyone that goes down the spamming route would fail. Instead, I think it’s better to think in terms of this in an analagous way to Google’s Adsense.
That is, Adsense is great because when you search in Google, you’re sending out a gesture to say what you’re interested in. For example, if you search for “iPod” in Google, the top Adsense link is a link to the iPod page in the on-line Apple store of your country (Google can tell the country from your IP address). In a sense that’s *already* LBS, but at a very broad level. NB - Apple’s landing page for this ad seems to be broken, but you get the idea.
For mobile LBS, you could be on the street, and search in your mobile phone browser for “MP3 player”. You could get back ads for nearby stores that sell MP3 players, with one click to order it, so that it’s waiting for you to pick up when you walk in the store.
In other words, for mobile LBS search, you can combine the gestures of search terms, with the gesture of precise location.
Posted 02 Oct 2007 at 5:49 pm ¶