Location Takes Top Spot at Mobile World Congress

March 17, 2009 By: Janice Partyka GPS World

Don’t let news of lower attendance at this year’s Mobile World Congress fool you into thinking it wasn’t a good show. Location was forward, front and center. Companies are finally acting like they believe that there is money to be had in knowing where people are, or as the industry likes to say, applications with “contextually relevant user experience.” Nokia calls it social location. Others, “location aware.” William Safire would have a field day.

App stores are hot and will continue to break open the market for location applications. Nokia launched its Ovi store, forecasting it will reach a 300 million addressable device base by 2012. Developers will receive 70% of revenue. Microsoft presented its Window Marketplace for mobile and LG Electronics will have their own entrant in the second quarter.

Eyebrows were raised because Android-based devices were a bit of a no-show. Samsung and HTC didn’t announce these as expected, but Vodafone launched its Android entry called Magic.

Kanwar Chadha (at right), stalwart GPS evangelist, has worked hard to move the GSM community to GPS. I checked in with the founder of SiRF for his thoughts about this year’s GSM World Congress.

What was different about the treatment of location at World Congress this year?

Chadha: I have been visiting the GSMA Mobile World Congress (formerly 3GSM World Congress) for almost a decade now. GPS, location-based services (LBS), and location technology in general moved from the backburner to center stage this year.

When did GPS start getting traction among the GSM community at the World Congress?

Chadha: I started to see a clear change in the coverage of GPS at the 3GSM Congress in the 2006 time frame. There were multiple reasons for it, but a few stood out. Major operators in the U.S. were starting to deploy LBS and use it as a differentiator. Personal navigation devices (PNDs) began to have impact on the mainstream consumer space, and operators saw navigation as a potential revenue-generating application. GPS silicon technology had solved the key fundamental issues for integration into handsets. The last piece of the pie was that smartphone innovators were starting to integrate GPS into their products.

In 2006-07, a number of other factors contributed to the rise of GPS. RIM made GPS a key feature of the BlackBerry platform. Nokia bought gate5 and Navteq, indicating a major commitment to location services. These developments led GPS and location to start becoming mainstream at the Mobile World Congress. When I participated on the Location Services Panel in 2008, it was a standing-room-only crowd.

How have new devices and mobile platforms influenced the uptick in location?

Chadha: GPS and location services also became “cool” thanks to iPhone and Google Android. It was good to see that location and GPS were one of the key highlights of the conference this year, with Nokia clearly taking a leadership role and demonstrating a broad range of location-enabled applications targeted at mainstream consumers. Garmin-Asus launched the location-centric nuvifone platform. As I roamed the show floor, I found that most of the interesting new phone platforms, especially smartphones and high-end feature phones, had GPS as a key feature and it is almost taken for granted. I also saw many more content providers taking advantage of location capabilities of the A-GPS phone platforms. Nokia Sports Tracker, a GPS-based activity tracker, bagged the top prize for Best Mobile Internet Service at the Congress’ Global Awards 2009.

How did you spend your time at the World Congress before the GSM carriers became interested in GPS?

Chadha: In my discussions with GSM operators, most of the time was spent explaining the benefits of GPS over other location technologies and why a “Killer LBS Application” was not a requirement to build a profitable model for deploying location services. Many operators in Europe had been burnt by deploying cell ID-based LBS and were reluctant to take risks with GPS. Most of the handset vendors were concerned about the cost, size, and power constraints of adding GPS to mobile phones and were not seeing any pull from operators. Many of the LBS content and application providers were gone in the 2000 Internet bust.

It was a lonely world for companies like SiRF, who were evangelizing GPS and location-enabled services to the mobile phone community. The foundations for bringing GPS to the mainstream mobile phone platforms were created at that time. I was so excited when Benefon, a small mobile phone vendor out of Finland, highlighted GPS as a differentiator for their GSM phones at the 3GSM Congress in early 2000s.

Any last thoughts?

Chadha: In short, my general impression of the 2009 Mobile World Congress was that after many years of talk about the “year of GPS & LBS,” GPS-powered location technology and location-enabled services have finally hit the mainstream mobile phone industry.

On a last note, Kevin Spacey was at the Mobile World Congress touting mobile short films. According to Spacey, “It’s still too early to know what kinds of (mobile) films will become classics — it’s wide open in terms of ideas.” Classics? Are we seriously looking for the next Stanley Kubrick or Alfred Hitchcock of the mobile screen? Want to watch ten minutes of American Beauty on your BlackBerry? Not me.