New Alliance Paves Way For Location-Based Services Growth; Aims To Establish LBS Codes Of Conduct
Peggy notes: Good catch James! Speaking of LBS, I’m on my way out the door to catch a flight to London, where I chair the second day of the debut industry conference, Location Based Services: Maximizing Revenue and Engaging the Consumer, organized by VIBevents. The theme on Thursday is optimizing revenue streams in LBS, and I’ll be joined by some new and old colleagues including Andrew Grill, mobile advertising evangelist and frequent contributor to MSG; Franklin Segert, Senior Innovation Officer at mobile operator KPN; Nilam Girn, Head of Mobile Advertising at Telefonica O2; and Shane Lennon, Senior VP, Strategy & Marketing, at the combination location, search and advertising service GyPSii. (Shane and his colleague Sam Critchley, VP, Products, got together recently for an MSG podcast that I hope to edit and post before I go to CTIA.)
Mapping, location services and local mobile search sit at the core of a range of mobile services. But growth may be stunted by fragmentation, disagreement about business models, and uncertainty about best practices. That’s why today’s launch of the Open Location Alliance is a milestone development sure to move the LBS industry a giant step forward.
The organization has been formed to respond to the requests from global players for pan-European location, location enabled applications, and Point of Interest (POI) information targeted at the mass market from mobile devices.
It brings together Mobile Commerce, U.K.-based developer and facilitator of content search solutions; MECOMO, a provider of location-based content and services in Central Europe; Deverywhere, a company in France offering cell-id location with all three mobile operators there; and Visibilly, a company that provides location data for all mobile phones in Sweden, Norway, and Finland. The initial partners of this business alliance obviously cover a good chunk of Europe, but they have indicated that they will “be seeking partners in other geographical markets to further consolidate their position.”
But it’s not just about providing LBS services and solutions. As Steve Page, CEO of Mobile Commerce, commented in a statement: “We will be working together on Codes of Conduct, best practices for location-based services, business models, technologies and solutions to drive the market and lead the industry forward with one clear voice.”
For me, the focus on developing Codes of Conduct is the real news. The stellar growth of LBS services has left a lot of questions unanswered, and even more ignored.
To make matters worse, a lack of consistent self-regulation in the space threatens to invoke both a heavy-handed response from Brussels and catastrophic decline in consumer confidence. (Where does business end and personal privacy begin? )
This is clearly where the Alliance can offer some answers. Its aim to establish much-needed Codes of Conduct may be the driver that can move LBS from a nice-to-have feature for smartphone users into the mass-market consumer killer-app we’ve all been waiting for.
Steve Page, Mobile Commerce CEO, and Kajsa Lundfall, Visibilly CEO, will both speak at the Location Based Services 2008 conference in Berlin organized by IIR Ltd. Check out the conference program here.
