Mobile & Wireless Roundup - Innovation & Industry News

There has been a lot of hype around location based services recently, and their potential benefits to the users through the exploitation of the fact that the user is mobile, and hence has a location.

Last week at MoMo, the topic was LBS, and an excellent presentation was given by Alcatel Lucent, showcasing their latest service called GeoPepper. The service, which is very similar to FireEagle by Yahoo which was demonstrated at ICE08, however it is out of closed and is available to developers and application service providers to start exploring. The services all offer an API through which developers can connect to get location information on users.

From this, there is plenty of potential, however, there currently exists a few limitations to LBS.

• A small percentage of mobile devices have built in GPS recievers, of which, a smaller percentage have the facility turned on in order to save battery
• GPS does not work indoors effectively
• Triangulation provides a rough location, for example, Google Maps often locates me to the nearest 1600m, or is unable to find my location
• Third Party applications often needed to communicate with servers

So how can this be issue be solved?
Well, currently there is no definitive answer, it all depends on the scale of the project that the service will be used for. An article over at MoCoNews entitled Shopping malls are tracking the habits of visitors using location based services provides an insight as to how one company is now offering services to track users on a local scale to find out their habits using mobile triangulation.

There is a much simpler solution for shopping malls to track users. Through bluetooth. All users broadcast their MAC Address when their bluetooth is turned on to discoverable. So if in each shop there is a bluetooth discovery module, which doesn’t actually ask to connect to the device, but just discovers bluetooth devices, they can be linked up to a central database to track exactly (more precisely than triangulation) where users have visited.
As the data of which types of stores are visited, and how frequently, carefully targeted proximity marketing can be implemented to offer loyally discounts to frequent users, or offers to entice potential customers through an opt in scheme.

Obviously the concerns about privacy of the users is still in question, but correct marketing techniques should be used to explain to the targeted users what is happening, how to receive  promotional campaigns through opt in procedures that are not overly complex.