Friend-finding dubious draw for LBS

by: admin Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

Rating: ABI reckons it is, though

I chuckled when I saw a report from ABI Research about mobile location based services. It started with the words… “After years of hype.”
Given that I’d pitched a location based service to VCs back in 1999, I’m probably responsible for some of that hype.

The basic premise of this report, however, is that ‘personal navigation’ – or getting from A to B – is going to be the application that fuels the take-off of LBS.

That and the fact that GPS is being built into W-CDMA and GSM handsets not just cdmaOne based devices.
But this report makes a simple error that I’ve been banging on about for years. It says that “Friend-finding is anticipated to be the next service launched for mass consumption.”
I don’t think so. People don’t want to pay to know where there friends are – even if it means more friendly faces in the pub. What they want to know is where the boss is. Unfriendly finder is more of a draw.
Plus, they also want to find people who aren’t their friends right now but could be in the near future. We’re talking about location based dating here.

Still, the authors do make an interesting observation, namely that,”The wider availability of all-inclusive data tariffs will spur service usage.” So friend-finding could take off because it is effectively free.
A more serious point it makes is, “Once services provided by one carrier are capable of seamlessly incorporating users from other networks, then the usage of LBS will be driven virally.”

In other words, operators will relearn the lesson they discovered with SMS, that texting will take off massively once it becomes inter-network.

Hands up those who can remember Vodafone stalwartly holding out against national interconnexion of SMS services?
And finally for those of you fond of figures, the report says “LBS revenue is forecast to reach an annual global total of $13.3 billion by 2013, up from an estimated $515 million during 2007.”

My chances of snatching a proportion of it are, of course, still extremely slim.