LBS services do not meet operator expectations — MobileMonday Global: Industry News

^{‘Find a friend’ fails to find cash} LBS services do not meet operator expectations

16 Oct 2005 at 09:31 GMT Timo Poropudas

Mobile carriers have stopped looking at location-based services as a possible premium service, according to a panel of wireless carriers at the CTIA Wireless IT and Entertainment tradeshow in San Francisco, reported vnunet.com.

Location-based services were considered the next big thing for mobile carriers. This development has been exceedingly slow even in the US where E911 laws have forced the operators to push positioning capable handsets.

Adding GPS technology to mobile handsets, or looking at the mobile transmitter that an individual is using, would allow users to determine their position.

Operators have failed to attract many users with their services that would allow users to locate nearby friends, or point them to local shops and services. They have been somewhat more successful in finding some applications with enterprises.

“Finding a friend is fine maybe once,” said J H Kah, global vice president at South Korea Telecom. “We do make a good revenue from it, but it’s still a small portion [of our overall business],” vnunet.com reported from the CTIA Wireless in San Francisco.

Mahesh Prasad, president of Indian mobile operator Reliance, added: “There are no compelling applications for consumers. Find a friend is not what I call a compelling application for people to pay for.”

An analyst firm Juniper Research predicted in June that the market for location-based services is set to grow from USD 1bn to USD 8.5bn in the next five years.

Graeme Ferguson, director of global content development at Vodafone, thinks that the services are a typical example of businesses getting over excited about a technology while failing to look at the usage case for consumers.