Carriers warm up to location-based services

Wireless operators have access to the most granular information about their customer base, which is why the location-based services (LBS) industry has both a lot of promise and a lot of challenges. Security and the perception of privacy have caused many operators to think twice about LBS, but that is rapidly changing, as location is increasingly embedded into applications and services outside its staples: GPS and family tracking. Most recently, Sprint launched an open location platform with uLocate’s Where and pioneer WaveMarket’s location-aggregation platform Veriplace to build LBS with an emphasis on security and privacy. Also in the past week, Verizon promised it would unlock GPS data on three of its new Windows Mobile handsets, and Alltel Wireless introduced a Trimble Outdoor GPS app for off-road navigation. Joel Grossman, vice president at WaveMarket, spoke with Associate News Editor Sarah Reedy about how the power of location is overtaking privacy concerns.

On how Sprint will work with Veriplace: Until Veriplace, the carriers didn’t have a way to enforce [privacy] universally across all of their applications. So the reason we’ve only seen a small handful of LBS applications is not because of a lack of good ideas but because whenever a carrier launches a service, the service itself is responsible for managing the security and privacy measures. The carriers went through significant auditing and testing and ensuring it was appropriate for their end users, but they didn’t have a way to say to third parties, “Here is our [application program interface (API)], and we know the privacy and security systems are in place whenever you try to access those.” So they prevented access to all but a very small set of hand-selected applications and services. What Veriplace does is allow them to apply a model universally and say to third parties, “I’m no longer worried about it because I know you can only access it through Veriplace, and Veriplace is going to enforce the privacy and security and give end users a place to log in and set permissions.” They didn’t have that before this.

On AT&T’s role in accelerating the industry: There certainly is an issue that more and more carriers are aggressively marketing their LBS services and in early 2009 you are going to see some other large carriers in the US actually launching. In the middle or late part of ’08, AT&T announced they are deploying an LBS infrastructure. They haven’t publically launched any services on that yet, but they will be doing that in early ’09. Now that you have the biggest player in the market in LBS, it is going to really take off because this is marketed to all those users. As a whole, the tide is rising, so to speak, because of more ubiquity. Also, costs are dropping, and the applications are honestly just getting better.