Earlier tonight, I attended a seminar on LBS, setup by SVCWireless.
Moderator:
Breaux Walker, Partner, America’s Growth Capital
Panelists:
Glenn Chen, Partner, Woodside Capital Partners LLC
Kris Kolodziej, CTO, Spime Inc
Marc Prioleau, VP Marketing & Business Development, deCarta, Inc.
Dave Reid, Director, Business Development, Wireless Segment, SiRF Technology Inc.
It was a fairly good session with a lively panel covering a variety of topics.
When Breaux asked about interesting LBS applications, here were the following responses:
- Kris: Features within Navigation such as POI (Points of Interest) search, Traffic (potentially automatic re-routing), and buddy/friend finder.
- Marc: Using LBS data as one of the mashups for things like geotagging photos and machine identification of objects in the image. This significantly enhances the experience.
- Glenn: Enterprise applications that will utilize LBS. Additionally, the need for speed and reliability.
- Dave: Local Search and Navigation. Even if someone lives in an area for a long time, there are still new places, interesting events happening all the time.
- Breaux: Location Based Dating! Finding compatible mates within proximity. Popular in Asia.
On the topic of Market Opportunity within LBS:
- Marc: The number of potential mobile applications that are based on the spectrum of personal navigation devices, such as TomTom and Garmin and the Off-Board Navigation like Google Maps, where computation is done from a server and display and presentation are sent to the device.
- Dave: While perhaps a decade or more away, building a uniform and framework that will support location and proximity for local advertising, but ultimately leading to a transaction.
- Kris: Social Networks with Location.
- Glenn: Rich multimedia applications that integrate location.
On the topic of Market Obstacles for LBS:
- Dave: Power is less of a concern, thus battery life should improve.
- Kris: Solving the problem of different displays, operating systems, input methods, etc.
- Marc: Developers getting to market through mobile operators, channels, etc.
- Glenn: Hardware constraints of putting for example, an FM radio, GPS, and WiFi components all on one chip. If too close, the physics cause interference with each other, thereby making it impossible to use GPS and talking on the phone simultaneously.
Marc had an additional comment that his experience with Location, is derived an axiom to build products for customers within this specification:
10 x 10 x 10 – 10 meter accuracy, within 10 seconds of results (total from acquisition time to compute to display) and using 10 mA (milliAmps) or less of power.
On the topic of Privacy Concerns related to LBS, Breaux shared some demographic information, roughly stating:
< 20 yrs old – Not concerned (look at what kids share on Facebook, for example)
20 to 30 yrs old – Some concerns
30+ years old – Very concerned, if not horrified about Privacy and LBS
That stated, the panel mentioned that just like all new technology, there will be adoption curves of this technology and admit that there are people who will be very concerned, for the most part, if there are a healthy mix of free and paid or even subsidized models, along with an opt-in/opt-out process, privacy becomes a moot point. The except would be for Law Enforcement, when trying to catch a criminal.
Lastly, the panel was asked about Business Models in LBS:
Ultimately, the belief is that currently there is a very large disconnect between the brands and ad agencies and local advertising or utilizing LBS for targeted advertising. While the LBS side would like to make money on transactions as well as offering ad subsidized models, the brands and ad agencies simply do not know how to buy or even package these bundles into useful models for success.
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