Sprint details Xohm location-based services plans, partners

Sprint is planning on making location-based services—and their associated advertising revenue—a big part of its Xohm WiMAX launch. The operator today revealed 8 new partnerships with location-driven content companies and technology vendors to help power the search capabilities of the Xohm portal.

Sprint plans on taking Xohm live next month, launching its first WiMAX market in Baltimore. The first subscribers installing the Xohm software on their laptops will apparently find a highly developed home screen waiting for them, with Google providing the overriding search functions but also numerous widget-based applications tied to the content databases and location services of Yelp, uLocate, Navteq, Eventful, Topix and AccuWeather. On the backend, Openwave Systems is providing the partner-integration platform and application programming interface (API) that allows partners to access Xohm’s GPS and cellular triangulation infrastructure, Autodesk is supplying the interface and geospatial services, and of course, Google’s Local Search engine will be the customer-facing platform powering it all.

Sprint has stated for some time that LBS would be a key driver for the Xohm platform, providing not only value-added services to distinguish it from other broadband and mobile providers but also a key revenue stream to augment subscription fees and help Xohm avoid the perils of becoming a dumb broadband pipe. Vice president of Xohm Services Rick Robinson said Sprint has assembled a varied and sizable number of content partners to power the initial Xohm launch, but they are just the beginning.

“We’re working with partners so they can plug into our [location] API, but we also hope this will spark the imagination of developers,” Robinson said. “We hope they’ll see this as a whole new opportunity for services they haven’t even imagined yet. We hope they go crazy.”

Robinson, however, was quick to point out that Xohm will not be a closed or walled-garden network. While the Xohm portal will appear when the service is launched on a laptop or device, users are free to navigate away from it or access all of the individual content services independently of the Xohm portal. But--at least initially--only services accessed through the Xohm destination page will have access to the location API and therefore access to cellular triangulation and eventually GPS as the satellite technology makes it into more WiMAX devices.