Geolocation on the “Horizon”

Presenter: Jason Finkelstein, Director of Product Management & Marketing, WaveMarket, Inc.

Geolocation is here, but it’s still got a long way to come (pun intended).  Geolocation started with in-car navigation systems and then moved to personal navigation devices.  Now we’re onto personal location devices that can track you or devices.  The focus of this presentation was on mobile phones.

55% of all SMS messages are “where r u?” – That’s about 650 billion location based text messages in 2009.

We are just starting to see the future of location based services:

Location is a feature of many kinds of products and services, not an industry unto itself or a vertical market.

Types of Geolocation Data:

• Latitude/longitude
• Latency – how long does it take to find your signal/location
• Confidence – radius – still not a lot of confidence in cellular tower location
• Reverse Geocoded (real world address) and Points of Interest – pre-populated locations
• Location Tagged Info (Tweets, Flickr photos, etc.)
• Map Data Layers/GIS (This is a whole industry) – City names, street names, street geometry (one way street, speed limits), Satellite/birdseye/terrain

The industry is working on a “Z” (XYZ axis) to be able to track altitude.

Variables influencing ability to get location information from mobile devices:

Carrier Network – different carriers have different kinds of location built-into their networks, this location is accessed in different ways on each carrier network and can vary in accuracy and latency.

Device Type – 200 million mobile subscribers, Most (81.5%) have limited devices which generally don’t have GPS, but can be found. Some (18.5%) have smartphones with GPS built in.

While the use of GPS chips is increasing, if you are planning to develop location based apps today, you must still cater to the 4/5 of people who do not have this functionality.  The value chain for this development is structured like this:

1. Infrustructure players – Do the calculation of where that phone is – Qualcomm, Nokia Siemens Networks, Sony Ericson, Redknee

2. Wireless carriers – AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon – provide the phones and services

3. Location Aggregator – Veriplace – pulls together location data for API tie in by developers

4. LBS Developer/Content – develop the apps and plug-ins

5. End User – uses the device, apps, etc.

However, when GPS is built into the phone, this chain is not completely required.  Apps can then be built to interact with the internal GPS API to utilize location data. 

Here are the ways location can be accessed today along with advantages and disadvantages of each:

Standalone GPS – It’s free, uses GPS satellites, so need line of site location.  It’s high accuracy, but it takes a long time to get location (minutes), and some carriers lock the GPS chip.  Download and install an app is still a challange for most people and app developers must develop for different devices.  Also, the app must be running to access location.  It does provide latitude and longitute, which the others don’t. 

Cell ID – It depends upon a location database of cell towers.  The phone connects to cell tower and this “location” uses knowledge of where the cell tower is located.  The accuracy of this is lower, but it’s used for both smartphones and feature phones, because it can be located indoors, and has quick location fix (<3 seconds).

WiFi – This also depends on a location database.  It’s similar to Cell ID, but uses MAC addresses on WiFi hotspots – which have limited coverage today.  It can be unreliable due to wifi spots that move. However, if the device has open access to wifi the cost is zero.

Carriers are supporting more location based technolgies on both smarphones and feature phones and sometimes use a combination of the methods above for identifying location:

Assisted GPS – A hybrid of GPS and Cell ID

Triangulation – AFLT – The next level of Cell IDs, it uses multiple Cell ID’s to center a location.  It’s easily accessible via carrier networks and quick  (<10 seconds)

Location is still a challenge for many developers because of this confusing web of networks and the many ways devices can use to find location.  App developers in this area are still sorting through the challenges of location information and authentication and a whole new layer of legal and privacy challenges have arisen.  A recent study showed that people are more concerned about privacy surrounding their location than their credit card data.

Therefore, developer have proceeded forward with a few approaches, such as choosing to focus only on downloadable apps for limited smartphones (iPhone/Android).  Some have made deals with carriers, but there’s a high barrier to entry, so some are working through aggregators like Veriplace to add location to certain app types like sms/voice/web.