Subject: [NEXTEL-1] IHT - "Location-based services find niche "

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 05 May 2003 21:37:24 -0400

-------- Original Message --------
From: Anthony Townsend <[email-masked]>

Location-based services find niche
Nick Selby IHT
Monday, May 5, 2003
 
MUNICH On Thursday, the Hong Kong mobile phone company Sunday 
Communications Ltd. started "Loved-Ones Radar," allowing parents to 
track, within 150 meters (500 feet), the location of their 
cellular-toting child.

Last week in Britain, the makers of London's black taxis began an 
automated service that locates a cell phone caller, identifies the taxi 
nearest that person and then puts the caller in direct voice contact 
with the driver. For this you pay £1.60 ($2.60) on top of the metered 
fare.

And since last month, Hong Kong residents have been able to dial a 
number on their mobile phones to get free SARS-related data. The 
service determines the caller's location and sends a text message 
containing addresses of buildings within 1,000 meters that have 
reported severe acute respiratory syndrome infections.

Three years ago, the hype about such so-called location-based services, 
or LBS, was overwhelming, with operators openly threatening to beep 
your phone with coupon offers whenever you passed a Starbucks. Today, 
the arrival of LBS is relatively unheralded, even as the services are 
filtering into the mainstream of mobile applications.

Depending on your location, your handset and the services your mobile 
phone company uses, you can use a cell phone to get buzzed when a 
friend is nearby, play hide-and-seek-like games with friends or 
strangers, find apartments to rent near where you are standing or get 
medical help, all without opening your mouth. Services that locate the 
nearest towing company, automated teller machine or florist have also 
been popular, analysts say.

"The applications that make the cut," said Jed Kolko, lead analyst for 
consumer devices at Forrester Research Inc. in California, "are simple, 
quick hits of information that the customer needs here and now and 
cannot do without a mobile phone."

Unlike cell phone services like video calling that require new, 
high-speed data networks still under development, most LBS offerings 
work on existing networks, allowing operators to provide the services 
without major investment. For the consumer, the cost can vary widely 
from about 19 euro cents (21 U.S. cents) to E2 a message.

The simplest technology locates where your phone is - and, presumably, 
you - by identifying which cellular antenna is picking up and 
transmitting your phone's signal. But that antenna can be as much as 
one kilometer (six-tenths of a mile) away.

Better software in the network essentially triangulates among antennas 
to determine the caller's position to within 300 to 500 meters. Still 
more accurate technology uses the satellite-based Global Positioning 
System to locate a transmitter in the phone. But these phones cost more.
With technology not a barrier, the question in the telecom industry, 
then, was what services to offer. It turned out that it wasn't going to 
be coupons after all.

"We launched 'push-based' coupon-messaging in Hong Kong shopping malls 
in 1997," said Bruce Hicks, group managing director of Sunday 
Communications. "Its failure proved that people don't adjust their 
social habits just because a technology is available. To succeed, it 
must be simple and complement the way that they already do things."
"Changing social behavior takes forever," said Swen Halling, chief 
executive of It's Alive Mobile Games AB, a Stockholm-based LBS 
developer that makes the location-based games Supafly and BotFighters, 
a phone-based role-playing offering.

Many operators provide services like TeliaSonera Corp.'s Friend Finder, 
which allows a subscriber of the Nordic telecom to set up lists of 
friends and get an alert when one is nearby.

While this kind of buddy-finder service was one of the first to appear 
in many countries, in France the earlier priority, according to 
Frederic Jarjat, LBS product manager for France Telecom SA, was 
LBS-enabled chat - or, more specifically, "flirt," a service whereby 
subscribers can exchange text messages with total strangers who are in 
their vicinity.

TeliaSonera also has a service with a novel twist: You're walking down 
a pleasant street in Uppsala and think that it looks like a nice place 
to live. You send a text message on your phone to the number 4412, and 
you get a return message listing the nearest three available apartments 
- and the phone numbers to call about them.

LBS technology also leads naturally to security-based products, such as 
"panic buttons" for older or ill users, or a Find My Kid service like 
Sunday's, which several operators are already testing.
But, in general, LBS offerings rank low on the list of what people do 
with mobile phones.

Operators do not publicize usage figures for any given service, but 
industry analysts and applications developers say LBS options make up 
less than 1 percent of mobile usage.

Michelle de Lussanet, telecommunications analyst at Forrester in 
Amsterdam, said that in terms of average revenue per user, data 
services as a whole make up 10 percent to 14 percent of cell phone 
carriers' business. Almost 98 percent of that is person-to-person text 
messages.

"The remainder is mainly ring tones and operator logos," she said. 
"This doesn't leave a lot of room for other services."
Zingo, the taxi locater that is a unit of Manganese Bronze Holdings 
PLC, said that of the 12,000 licensed black taxis that cruise London's 
streets on any given day, 500 are outfitted with its equipment. More 
than 6,300 people have tried it since the beginning of the company's 
trial this year.

Sunday said that in the first week of its SARS service, 16,000 of its 
650,000 Hong Kong subscribers used it.

Operators and analysts say a large-scale introduction of LBS will take 
years; Forrester predicts that data applications like LBS will not take 
off until 2006 or so, when today's teenagers become the next generation 
of high-tech adults.

And some services also could suffer if they are too accurate. The 
director of new technologies at Sunday, Henry Wong, said, "Our focus 
group of Hong Kong youths showed us that teens overwhelmingly don't 
want the kid-finder because it doesn't let them lie about where they 
are."

The International Herald Tribune

------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Rent DVDs from home.
Over 14,500 titles. Free Shipping
& No Late Fees. Try Netflix for FREE!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/BVVfoB/hP.FAA/uetFAA/61FxlB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/