Enterprise Market Pays for Location

October 20, 2010 By: Janice Partyka

Wireless Pulse, October 2010

San Francisco. What is next for location? If you were at CTIA this month, you wouldn’t have failed to notice the heightened enterprise market for mobile solutions. This is good news in a market where consumers are expecting, and getting, location-enabled apps for free. Enterprises are in OWSM mode, the “open wallet state of mind,” as they require highly reliable, often customized, secure applications and technology, and are willing to pay for them. Increasingly enterprises are using mobile phones for location-aware productivity solutions, and not surprisingly, mobile vendors are offering more enterprise-grade services and hardware. Blackberry, the long dominant platform for mobile business, is shrinking and business users are moving onto Android and iPhone solutions.

Next Location Killer App? So what’s next? Development of indoor location will unleash new apps and enhance existing apps that are currently confined to an outdoor experience only. “The most suitable technology for indoors,” asserts Kanwar Chadha of CSR, “is a combination of GNSS with accelerometers, gyros, and Wi-Fi.” People assume that what they can do outdoors, they can seamlessly do indoors, like geotagging a photo. Chadha adds that another challenge is that the indoors is not mapped. This is not a small undertaking, and the burden may rest on facilities providing content providers with mapping. Consumer-saturated locales like shopping areas, stadiums, resorts, hotel, and convention centers will likely be the first.

Location Couponing Success. Placecast’s ShopAlerts seems to have mobile location-based couponing worked out. ShopAlerts is a white-labeled solution that allows brands to send coupons to customers within a particular area who have opted into the service. Placecast has sent millions of ads on behalf of companies like Sonic, Northface, and Vans. Ann Bezancon of Placecast walked me through their metrics. Redemption for mobile coupons is an astonishingly high 24 percent for clothing and 65 percent for quick-service restaurants. Bezancon gently explained that the term “quick-service restaurant,” and not “fast food” is the preferred moniker (at least among McDonalds stockholders).

Location Fuel. How do content providers like Placecast determine the locations of their users’ handsets? With aggregators like Loc-Aid, Location Labs, and TechnoCom, they obtain a real-time handset location from wireless networks and rapidly hand the location data to the application. By using an integrator, content providers avoid the complexity and time-to-integrate with each carrier. TechnoCom is the location integrator fully focused on enterprise business and has announced Cross Country Automotive Services as a new customer.

Have You Sat in a Ford Lately? I hunkered down in the Ford Fiesta with wcities’ Fraser Campbell, and can understand Ford’s success. SYNC, with 2.5 million users, replicates the mobile phone’s display in-dash and now is capable of 10,000 voice commands. Sounds like someone scored high on their SAT scores. wcities, which provides SYNC with rich point-of-interest data, creates travel content for more than 350 world cities.

How Is this Going to Work? On the topic of cars and mobile, the future of navigation lies in its integration with advanced driver safety assistance. This covers technology like adaptive cruise and light control and lane change departure warnings. Part of the hitch is the wide variety in standards among automotive companies, applications, and mobile providers. Nokia is still pushing its Terminal Mode Initiative for industry-wide standards for integration of phones and mobile applications into vehicles. To move forward on a mobile automotive platform, an industry standard that is both service and device agnostic is critical. Let’s hope we see industry cooperation.

Google Pain. At the GPS Wireless 2010 conference, a panelist asked, “How many audience members’ companies have been hurt by Google?” About 75 percent of attendees raised their hands. Navigation was the killer app that sustained many businesses, but thanks in part to Google moving the industry away from subscription to free models, it is no longer as viable as a separate line item. A panelist suggested the industry understand that while navigation doesn’t provide revenue, it can be monetized. Car manufacturers don’t get revenue off of power windows, but can monetize them. Another panelist suggested companies just remove the letter “g” from keyboards.

Location Spots Fraud. Finsphere introduced PinPoint, a service that helps consumers detect credit and debit card fraud. Users have their credit card and other financial transactions tracked and compared to the physical location of their handsets, If the wireless network shows a person’s handset is in Chicago while his credit card is being used in a store in a New York City, the credit-card owner is alerted. Other non-location based indicators are also employed to detect fraudulent use.

Word from the Press Room. I strolled the CTIA newsroom to ask my peers what they considered the big stories of CTIA. Most seemed a bit glum and laughed out loud about the existence of a “big” CTIA story. Android phones and the accelerated Verizon LTE roll-out were the most popular responses. Others mentioned Google TV, Logitech TV, updates to Ford SYNC, and the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Show Tip. If you attended CTIA and were disappointed, I have a tip for you. The best venues were co-located with CTIA: Kevin Dennehy’s GPS Wireless 2010 and CSR’s Location & Beyond Summit 2010. They included top players, a field of up-and-comers, and good discussions.