Mobile business 2.0: It's location, location, location

Computerworld - Struggling to find yourself?

Maybe you are searching for a higher spiritual domain. But you may have something more earthly in mind, such as finding driving directions to an important meeting or a hotel late at night on roads you've never traveled.

After years of hype and empty promises, location-based technologies are finally blossoming. New assisted GPS chip sets and software in ever-more-powerful wireless devices are providing driving directions for weary travelers and tracking information to truck fleet dispatchers, vendors and analysts said. The technology upgrades were prompted in recent years by federal requirements for carriers to provide enhanced 911 services, which are used to find cell phone users in emergencies, analysts said.

Location-awareness technology is also enabling services that help keep track of children, pets and even prisoners under house arrest. Services are emerging to help find the nearest coffee shop or gas station, or to locate a cell phone or other handheld device as tracked by satellites or other location methods, said Mark Emery, director of strategic accounts at Air2Web Inc., a vendor of location and other wireless applications in Atlanta.

While many of the emerging location services are focused on consumers, many different applications are used by service fleets to help keep drivers from getting lost or from making unneeded trips, said Mary Foltz, director of wireless data business solutions at Sprint Nextel Corp. The lines between business and consumer applications are blurred with location services, because businesses might buy services such as restaurant-finding technology for executives, she said.

All the major U.S.-based carriers are offering location services, and the growth of the services is poised to explode in the next one to two years, according to vendors at a recent Mobile & Wireless Enterprise conference sponsored by Frost & Sullivan Ltd. As a sign of the interest, nine vendors or service providers made presentations about location technologies at the event last week, including Sprint; @Road Inc., a subsidiary of Trimble Navigation Ltd.; Omnilink Systems Inc.; and TeleNav Inc.

"We see the growth [in location services] hitting the upward curve of the traditional hockey stick" in the next year," said Joe Astroth, a vice president at Autodesk Location Services, a division of Autodesk Inc. in San Rafael, Calif. His company provides software that powers location capabilities for Sprint and Verizon Communications Inc., among others, he said.

Brent Iadarola, an analyst at Frost & Sullivan, said revenues for location services in the U.S. were about $208 million last year, but that number that should hit $605 million by the end of this year and is expected to double to $1.3 billion at the end of 2008. The number of users of location services by the end of 2008 should exceed 17 million, and it will reach nearly 70 million in 2011, he said.