I had a great chat yesterday with the LBS team at Openwave here in California. They read MobHappy and invited me in for an exchange of views while I was here. It’s nice to meet other people who are still true believers in the success of LBS, albeit with a realistic view of the market mixed with their evangelism.
In case you don’t know, Openwave make a lot of the midddleware/enabling technologies that carriers need to deploy LBS - the secret sauce that makes things happen, to employ a cliche common in Silicon Valley.
One very interesting snippet I learned that did surprise me, despite my own evangelism is that this year will see revenue from LBS outstrip investment. This is a really exciting milestone.
My own experience of LBS shows that there’s a lot of scepticism at operator level about the potential, particularly in the UK. There is a feeling that because early experiments didn’t work, future applications won’t either. However, the early stuff tended to polarise around local search - find my nearest ATM, for example - and as I’ve written before, most people spend most of their time in environments where they know this information anyway. And on the odd occasion that they need to know this kind of thing, they’ve forgotten all about that potentially useful application.
As I’ve also written before, the innovation needed to drive non-voice mobile usage forward is unlikely to come from the operators themselves and that’s as true for LBS as for anything. So it’s opportune to read that Berg Insight have published new research into LBS today, based on interviews with 200 people working in this area.
There’s not a lot of surpises in the research, though it’s very useful to have gut feel and snippets of the jigsaw validated by the big picture. However, of most interest was that 35% of operators are looking for “looking for more innovative LBS that really can catch the needs of the end-users” which I find encouraging in itself. Although you have to wonder at the 65% who aren’t looking for this. I wonder what they are looking for? More boring location based services that don’t catch the needs of the end user?
Among the vendors and consultancies interviewed, this figure rose to 48% who were looking for the innovative approach, although again I have to question the sanity of those questioned who didn’t recognise the need to innovate, rather than the same old, same old approach to this market.
The question I always ask at this stage though, is what are these hugely successful, cash-rich, profitable and innovative (in their own way) companies doing to stimulate innovation among the cash and profit poor, struggling entrepreneurs who will invent the applications that will kick start the market. The MoSoSo’s, the virtual graffiti deployers, location gamers and the local file sharing disrupters (to categorise a few of them) who will shape this new market.
I know it’s unlikely to happen, but it won’t stop me suggesting it. If operators diverted 5% of the their massive marketing or R&D budgets to Nurturing Grants for these bright young companies, we’d see a real fast-forward effect that would benefit the whole value chain immeasurably.
Great idea about the 5% Nurturing Grants - where do we sign up?
In all seriousness though, I would really like to have better integration with the carriers location info. Here’s my suggestion, for which I will gladly be the first customer to sign up:
1) Each carrier co-markets with two or three *relevant* LBS services to kick things off. This lets new customers see these cool new apps in action when they purchase the phone
2) The upsell during the sale, is to get the customer to sign up for “Location Awareness” (some marketing person can surely pick a jazzier/better term)
3) Location awareness costs a flat $2 a month
4) There is an on/off switch for Location Awareness (actually some of my older phones already had this - though I didn’t know what it really affected)
5a) When Location Awareness is on, web browsing requests will have an additional header with location information (simple geocoding, cell id, actual city/address, whatever - the services can use whatever they are given)
5b) When Location Awareness is on, new pictures, videos, audio, will be geotagged and that geotagging information will be preserved when they are transmitted (especially through email)
5c) When Location Awareness is on, messages will have geo/location information baked into their headers or other fields that will survive the journey to their endpoint (SMS,MMS,SMTP)
6) Sit back and watch the mobile web explode with LBS innovation
I suggested this to a T-Mobile guy a few days back and he favored the angle of a carrier partnership with a lead company. The problem with that approach is that is blocks *everyone* else out, including the people with the truly innovative ideas.
Please, some carrier, any carrier take the dive and release location as an easy to understand add on. I will gladly pay my $2.
“One very interesting snippet I learned that did surprise me, despite my own evangelism is that this year will see revenue from LBS outstrip investment.”
Hmm, I wonder how much investment money is being spent on LBS this year…
As someone playing around with applications in the proximty, location based, and even mobile graffiti world it would indeed be nice for operators to support some of these projects. If nothing else they could help drive awareness amongst the general public
Whilst the operators would give the location based applications a better profile, they’ll still flounder until someone creates a totally killer location based app. But what is that app? Is it a MoSoSo/Location Game hybrid?!
With that in mind, I’m trying to gather developers in this area together to form a ‘collective’ a company owned by the sum of its parts to conjure wonders in this area. I love the work (Paul) of the Mobile Radicals and have a crazy idea I want to develop but need to workshop it with people already experienced in this area.
Rediscovering the dead horse…
(Great posting as always Russell)
I think this is a classic case of California coming on board very late to the big party of mobile telecoms (having been blinded by the much smaller IT / PC / Internet industry). America is 4 years behind mainstream Europe, six years behind the leading markets like Scandinavia, South Korea and Japan. EVERYTHING we hear from America about mobile today, is old news in these markets.
So again, LBS. So now the Californians have discovered this dead horse, and feel somehow they can resurrect it? I am not saying there are “no” apps in LBS, only that it was so heavily overhyped years ago, that most every conceivable concept has already been trialled. Those LBS experts should take a VERY close look at the world’s most advanced LBS market - Japan - and its most experienced LBS operator, KDDI the second largest operator of Japan, which launched the world’s first LBS apps.
KDDI regularly talks about its LBS portfolio, and even in Tokyo - a city so confusing the street numbers are not in sequential order - where KDDI has been providing LBS based mapping and positioning services for over five years now - still today there is NO killer app in LBS.
There are dozens of games, dozens of family trackers and friends-finders and hunting dog trackers and allergy warnings and personal weather reports and even the pay-as-you-drive LBS insurance service etc launched around the world. My collection of over 1000 mobile app “Pearls” has literally dozens upon dozens of commercially launched LBS apps. But they don’t make significant amounts of money.
What Americans really, REALLY should do, is as they are so much behind, don’t go repeating everybody’s mistakes. Go study the advanced markets and try to catch up. LBS is a dead horse, don’t waste your money on it.
Oh, and anybody reading this - my second book from 2001, m-Profits - is the bible of how to build billable value to mobile apps. It has 170 service concepts outlined and has the industry’s service-creation tool, the Five M’s. Its available at Amazon and all major bookstores. I suggest you start with that book, and then read Russell Buckley’s excellent messaging book or Paul Goldings advanced mobile apps book, etc and go where the money and customers are. Don’t bother jumping into this pool of quicksand they call LBS…
Tomi Ahonen
4-time bestselling author on mobile
http://www.tomiahonen.com
blogsite http://www.communities-dominate.blogs.com