Location Based Services now...please!

I attended an interesting panel today on Mobile Search and Location Based Services (LBS) organized by Chinwag. Of the people on the panel by far the most interesting speaker was Felix Petersen co-founder of Plazes which has recently been acquired by Nokia. Here a few interesting thoughts and conclusions:

-Mobile Search vs. Discovery
There are two fundamentally different situations in which location sensitive information is received by the user. One is in the mobile search scenario: the user searches for something on her mobile, which doesn't necessarily have to be something location specific, and gets results that are not only relevant to the context of the search but also relevant to the context of the location. To make it easy let's take the example of a user searching for a point of interest in her vicinity i.e. a coffee shop. Not only does she get a list with local coffee shops but she could also discount coupons from the coffee shops in her immediate vicinity (push). The problem with this type of interaction, however, is that it can easily be perceived as Spam by the user.

The second situation is the discovery scenario: As the user is walking down the road the location aware friend finder service makes her aware of the fact that her buddy is in the coffee shop around the corner (pull). Obviously, this way of receiving location sensitive information is much more pleasant but also quite random and not easy to monetize upon through mobile marketing.

-Pizza & Coffee shop vs. Services
There was an interesting debate about the fact that many users are actually not interested in finding the local coffee shop, as people know where everything is in their own home town. One camp was arguing that POI search is only useful when traveling, which means it will only be relevant to a small percentage of the population. Others were saying that not only in big metropolitan areas but also in smaller places users would still find this feature interesting.

-Tracking vs. Checking in
Tracking means that a service follows your every move and makes that information available to others. These other people can obviously be picked by you very similar to your friends on Facebook. One could argue that it is not ideal to broadcast one's location to everyone at all times. You would for instance would want your work colleagues to know when you are in the office but you don't want them to know where you spend your weekends. So tracking services must come with a lot of different ways to limit the location broadcasting (in other words privacy settings) to work in a responsible way. The user would for instance have to be able to set rules like "broadcast my location to my wife at all times, unless I am at the Wednesday night Poker game or at the strip club on Windmill Street". This might prove to be too complicated for users.

Another alternative that plugs very much into the Twitter, Facebook status mentality, would be checking in into locations. The default in that case is not broadcasting the location, unless the user checks in. I would for instance check in at work and unless I don't check in anywhere else I will still be shown as in work. Again, one could perceive that the user would want certain privacy settings as she would not want to share her location with all her friends, even if she consciously checks in somewhere. It does make the whole privacy issue more manageable, though. One could also tie the check-in with the activation of context aware LBS (i.e. activate friend finder services to tell me who is here, send me coupons of stores near by etc).

-Massive fragmentation
One of the big problems that emerged during the discussions, was the fact that many local services have issues with getting local ad repositories. The reality is if you are making POI data available through an mobile service and want to live off ads, you will have to talk to all those small and medium businesses and sell them your story. The question is if that business will really get what you are talking about and if it does, how many different services it will trust with its marketing budget. The answer is probably not that many. It is quite clear that their is a huge need for an AdSense like solution that LBS providers can use for local context aware ads.

The conclusion for me was that although we all wanted LBS to be available about 5 years ago, their time is still not quite come. With the advent of the G1 and the iPhone we will see a dramatic shift that will accelerate in the short-term to bring us to the age of maturing LBS...finally!