Location-Based Services – Here, There and Everywhere

By: Richard “Zippy” Grigonis

Sitting at the intersection of personalized services mobile communications lies Location-Based Services (LBS), a technology whose time has come. Handset processing power and related technologies have matured. Over 1,000 apps are available for the iPhone (News - Alert) alone. We’ll all soon wonder how we ever got along without LBS.

ALOQA, founded in Germany in 2007, markets the ALOQA platform for Location-Based Services, which enables the simple interchange of location information between LBS participants such as the target person, the user, the LBS provider and the content provider. It supports proactivity and push services, recognizing spatial events automatically and making them available to other service providers. Events of this kind can pertain to individual persons, such as their leaving or entering zones, or several users, such as recognising the distance between two people. It supports an entire range of position-finding processes such as Cell ID, GPS, WLAN and GSM fingerprinting. It also makes a seamless transition between these technologies possible via hybrid positioning strategies.

Aloqa’s CEO, Dr. Georg Treu, says, “The LBS market is moving along. There are both opportunities and challenges. LBS has been around for quite some time. They did not initially succeed because of several problems. One was that the technology was not ready. For example, positioning has been networked-based thus far. The operator located the mobile phone and then some service is executed. The related cost model was also not adequate, Applications could not run on the phone, or you didn’t have enough phones to make the service a sound financial proposition. These problems are being solved. We have intelligent devices such as smartphones now that have GPS or other techniques so they can locate themselves. We see such things appearing as the iPhone, the Google Android (News - Alert), the Blackberry, and in Europe there are Symbian-based devices. These have all that you need to run LBS.”

“Many LBS apps are starting to appear, but most of these apps move the known usage paradigm from the PC to the mobile phone,” says Treu. “You can sit and use a PC all day long, unlike mobile phones because a mobile is usually in your pocket, so you don’t run around and use applications or search for friends all the time; instead you’re accustomed to your phone being a device that notifies you. The BlackBerry (News - Alert), for example, was a big success because it pushed email or text messaging to you and alerted you. That’s where we see the trend and challenge of the future, to enable push-based, location-based services. So your phone rings or vibrates and something appears that’s really relevant for you. That’s why our ALOQA TraX API can do push notification for any third-party application. Normally a mobile application has to open a connection to a central server and poll for updates with no way to push a message to a mobile client except for dedicated devices like a BlackBerry. The only way to send a message from one mobile client to another was to send the message to a central server and make all clients periodically request updates from the messaging server, resulting in extra data traffic, delayed delivery to the client and additional server load. Our ALOQA TraX can do push notification that sends messages directly to other clients. No additional server is needed, although it can accommodate one if you already have a server-based system. TraX can push data to mobiles even if your app is not location-based.”

Keeping Tabs on Road Warriors

Cbeyond (News - Alert) is a voice and broadband Internet provider that exclusively serves small businesses with everything from customized packages encompassing local, long distance and the Internet, to complete customer support. Cbeyond's Mobile Workforce Manager can reduce the costs of field-based operations by, among other things, tracking and recording the locations, hours worked and jobs performed by mobile employees.

Steve Zimba, Cbeyond’s Vice President of Marketing, says, “Our mobile business in general has been growing rapidly, with more and more small business customers signing on. Many of their employees are adopting mobile phones to a major degree. We’re aggressively moving to offer a line of hosted business applications. The Mobile Workforce Manager is the first of these. We chose it because many of our more mobile-based customers told us they have many mobile field service people, salespeople, landscapers, plumbers, electricians, and so forth. The business owners said it was great that they could give out mobile phones and contact mobile employees via voice, texting or email, but it would be great if they could get some productivity applications on the same mobile phones. To them, the mobile phone is becoming as much a handheld computer as a communications device. So we evaluated our options and came across a new strategic partner, Zora whose platform enables many of the core functions you’d want to manage a mobile workforce. Our small business customers can buy our mobile service, email and SMS, which gives them a core communications platform, and now we can come back behind that and give them a number of productivity-enhancing applications for those same workers.”

Bryan Melton, Product Manager for Cbeyond’s Mobile Workforce, says, “Many of our small business customers have trouble locating their mobile workers, and there were cases of ‘fudged’ timesheets. Our Workforce Manager is great at tracking mobile employees through our web-based portal. It allows mapping – essentially, the business owner can sit at his desk and see ‘dots on a map’ in real time. We also provide geo-fencing, limiting employees to a specific geographic location by tracking their whereabouts. Mobile workers can also now clock-in and out via their mobile devices, essentially making them electronic timesheets. Owners can also provide job scheduling/dispatching to their mobile workforce, so they’re saving on fuel costs and mileage by dispatching jobs to the nearest worker, such as sending the nearest plumber to an emergency call. With our application you can be as efficient as possible with your mobile resources. It also generates detailed reports, and can do ‘bread crumb trails’ which is a history of your mobile workforce – where they’ve been and what they’ve been doing all day. Our app has two components: the phone software that’s an over-the-air download and which can operate outside of the coverage area, and the control panel, the Add-Office Web Portal. That’s how we link the entire application together. And the service is just $20 a month, per mobile device, which would be any of our four GPS enabled smartphones – three BlackBerry devices and the Motorola (News - Alert) Q9C.”

Car 54 Where are You?

KORE Telematics is a multi-market MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) that has a major presence in AVL (Automatic Vehicle Location), a major segment of the M2M or “Machine-to-Machine” market (KORE says that as much as 45 percent of all M2M connections in North America are in the AVL segment). Their applications have widespread penetration in long-haul trucking and auto rental fleets. They realize that new LBS apps are more than just simple “where are we?” services – they’re becoming more integrated applications that support logistics services.

Edward Bursk, KORE’s CMO, says, “We have customers involved in services that are based on, or are augmented by, location information. KORE Telematics was founded with the idea that the next wave of wireless would all be about machine-to-machine; in other words, industrial networking applications, and machine communications which really goes beyond just B2B, such as B2C, and some of that is very much in play when you start to talk about location-based services. So, we’re a network services provider and we have Tier-1 relationships with many carriers worldwide. In the U.S. we deal with AT&T for GSM and Verizon (News - Alert) for CDMA services. We’re connected right into their back-end systems. We have access to their radio network and we provide our services to companies that are doing these sorts of machine networking applications. We go to market with over 550 solutions developer partners who specifically focus on the market segments they support, to deliver M2M communications.

All Roads Lead to LBS

Obviously, the more kinds of inputs an LBS system can accept, the greater its accuracy and utility. That’s what makes Skyhook Wireless (News - Alert)’ XPS so interesting, since it’s said to be the world's first true hybrid positioning system, combining as it does the benefits of GPS, cell tower triangulation and even WiFi (News - Alert) Positioning to fix a device’s location in less than a second to within a range of 10 to 20 meters, whether indoors or outdoors, in the country or downtown. Skyhook deals with the plethora of WiFi nodes via extensive WiFi hotspot mapping. A handset loaded with Skyhook’s thin client can detect which WiFi hotspot it’s connected to by interacting with the Skyhook Wireless server, which then computes the X, Y coordinate or street address of the handset’s current location. This methodology can be particularly useful when the user roaming about with the handset must suddenly dial 911. Moreover, Skyhook also offers Loki, a cross-platform browser plugin that uses Skyhook Wireless's WiFi Positioning System to enable third-party websites to integrate auto-location into their site by using a few lines of Javascript.

Ted Morgan, Founder and CEO of Skyhook Wireless, says, “The promise of LBS has been around for years. We can now confidently say that it has arrived. The kind of usage and volume on the iPhone alone is extraordinary. Over 1,000 apps are now in the Apple (News - Alert) App store that utilize location, and our technology in particular. A year ago there were maybe two or three apps across the carriers, relating to getting driving directions and maybe a local search or ‘kid tracker’. But now there’s been an explosion in the number of ideas and apps, and they’re becoming popular. Our system alone processes locations over 100 million times a day.”

Recently Skyhook Wireless’s XPS location system has found its way into apps running on Google’s Android phone, thanks to the developer community. IT

Richard Grigonis (News - Alert) is Executive Editor of TMC’s IP Communications Group.

Aloqa - (www.aloqa.com)

Cbeyond - (www.cbeyond.com)

KORE Telematics - (www.koretelematics.com)

Skyhook Wireless - (www.skyhookwireless.com)

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