Many people, and I'm one of them, think location-based services (LBS) will be central to the future mobile proposition and essential to mobile commerce. The magnitude of the LBS revolution that's about to hit is impossible to understate.
As Michael Specter recently put it in The New Yorker: "Our children may never fully understand the word 'lost', just as few people under the age of 10 have any idea what it means to 'dial' a phone number."
LBS has immediate implications for business. It could well be, for example, that the most important factor in established mobile operators' positions in the m-commerce value chain will come from their control over the location information that merchants and others will need to provide effective mobile services.
Strategy Analytics predicts that annual revenue from location-based services in Western Europe will reach $9bn in 2005 (and another $7bn in North America) but the m-commerce revenues dependent on these services may be significantly higher. For mobile service providers, LBS enables products and services that simply cannot be emulated on the fixed internet.
The implementation of mass-market location-based services is imminent. In the UK, for example, BT's Genie mobile ISP plans to launch LBS (using cell ID data to locate subscribers to within around 100m) early next year. In addition to the technological and business pressures, there are good reasons why law enforcement and government agencies want to see LBS introduced.
In the US, federal law will require mobile operators to be able to identify the position of anyone making a call to the emergency services by the end of 2002. This "E911" initiative will create an instant mass market for LBS in the US.
The US operators originally saw E911 as a bit of a nuisance, but this year it began to dawn on them that it might be the platform for an entirely new range of services.
Location might be established through a GPS unit built in to (for example) a laptop or it might be through the mobile networks. In the case of mobile LBS, there are two ways to establish location: the handset can work out where it is by triangulating from base stations (which requires hardware in the handset) or the network can work out where the handset is.
There is a natural temptation for mobile operators to implement LBS using network services rather than deploying new handsets or "add on" GPS devices and, in fact, this is exactly how the first deployments work (eg the TimesThree service already live in Canada).
Things are moving along smartly. There is already a proposed IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) protocol for location information-the Spatial Location Protocol, SloP-that gives a standard format (basically a location-time-accuracy triple) for communicating location from a device and the usual suspects (Motorola, Ericsson and Nokia) have formed the Location Interoperability Forum (LIF).
What is not covered by current protocols or initiatives is the really big issue: who is allowed to access LBS and under what circumstances. Here, there is a vast difference between using GPS and using mobile networks because the GPS satellites do not know where you are but the mobile networks do.
In other words, my device can obtain its location from GPS and then communicate this under my control. With a mobile, however, the network can figure out where I am and pass it on to other people without having me in the loop. If I call in sick, should my boss be able to call up a web page to see where I am?
Will the UK paparazzi be able to get Tom Cruise's mobile phone number and then track him wherever he goes? In South Korea there is already a mobile service that gives subscribers a list of celebrities, prioritised by their distance from the subscriber (eg, "No 1: Gwyneth Paltrow").
Will the police be able to check whether my phone got from the M1/M25 to M4/M25 junctions at more than 70 miles per hour?
More importantly, how am I going to be able to delegate authority for the school to track my children's whereabouts at certain times during the day but not others?
These issues, unlike the technical issues, seem some way from being resolved. So in the short term, it is likely that the major beneficiaries will not be mobile operators or mobile consumers but lawyers.
