Communications and Technology Industry Research

Location Based Services (LBS) are increasing in popularity for mobile users across the globe as more CDMA-based devices that incorporate GPS capabilities are introduced.  Also helping to increase the demand for mobile LBS are new consumer applications like friend-finder and family tracker.

According to the latest research from ABI, this will increase mobile LBS revenue from about $515 million during 2007 to an annual global total of $13.3 billion by 2013.

 

ABI Research's (News - Alert) "Mobile Location Based Services" report notes that the popularity of personal navigation applications will remain but that consumer applications that allow users to locate their friends or family members or get local search information will also become popular along with enterprise applications like workforce tracking and fleet management.

"Personal navigation and enterprise services are projected to be the highest revenue-generating services of the five LBS categories profiled, and are forecast to be worth about $4.3 billion and $6.5 billion respectively, per annum, by 2013," said Jamie Moss industry analyst, ABI Research.

The usage of mobile LBS will be further driven, according to ABI, once cross-network interoperability of services is made possible. This will allow users to remain in constant interaction with friends and family on other networks.

 

Also important to the increasing demand and usage of mobile LBS is the wider availability of all-inclusive data tariffs that, according to ABI, will "reduce users' concerns about how much data value-added services like LBS might consume."

 

"The interesting thing about the LBS content-producing sector is that much of the information is already available. It's a win-win situation for content providers: they already have established markets for their map and POI data (automotive and telematics), and LBS is yet another that could potentially provide them with considerable additional licensing revenue," also said Moss.