Mobile Location Based Services are growing at a rapid rate. Spearheaded by applications such as navigation, local search, social networking, and family and friend finding services, public understanding and adoption of the potential uses of Location Based Services is growing rapidly.
Studies have shown that the majority of mobile consumers embrace the potential for Location Based Marketing.
For instance, consumers in Asia Pacific countries are well acquainted with such services and have embraced them for some time. In European countries, adoption is decidedly ahead of their North American
counterparts. Nevertheless, growth, opportunity and challenges are all present, regardless of what region is being explored.
LBS Model:
LBS applications
- Recommending social events in a city.
- Requesting the nearest business or service, such as an ATM, restaurant or a retail store Turn by turn navigation to any address.
- Assertive Healthcare Systems.
- Locating people on a map displayed on the mobile phone.
- Receiving alerts, such as notification of a sale on gas or warning of a traffic jam.
- Location-based mobile advertising.
- Asset recovery combined with active RF to find, for example, stolen assets in containers where GPS would not work contextualizing learning and research.
- Games where your location is part of the game play, for example your movements during your day make your avatar move in the game or your position unlocks content.
- Real-time Q&A revolving around restaurants, services, and other venues.
- For the carrier, location-based services provide added value by enabling services such as: Resource tracking with dynamic distribution. Taxis, service people, rental equipment, doctors, fleet scheduling.
- Resource tracking. Objects without privacy controls, using passive sensors or RF tags, such as packages and train boxcars.
- Finding someone or something. Person by skill (doctor), business directory, navigation, weather, traffic, room schedules, stolen phone, emergency calls.
- Proximity-based notification (push or pull). Targeted advertising, buddy list, common profile matching (dating).
- Proximity-based actuation (push or pull). Payment based upon proximity (EZ pass, toll watch), automatic airport check-in.
