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Members of the emergency services community used to be a fixture at wireless industry trade shows. For a while, no show was complete without a panel urging the industry to get behind wireless E-911 location technology because there was a business case for location-based services beyond meeting E-911 mandates.
It took a while, but people like "The Reverend" John Melcher of the Greater Harris County [Texas] 911 Emergency Network -- nicknamed for his high-energy delivery in these sessions -- eventually made their case. Developers started painting location-based or location-enhanced services as the next big thing, a new wave of revenue-generating technologies coming hot on the heels of wireless data.
Well, it's been a couple years since this boom got started, and, not unlike wireless data itself, it still seems to be mostly a gleam in the industry's eye. Even the basic E-911 emergency location technology that was supposed to be the backbone of the location business is still spinning its wheels.
What happened?
As is often the case, it can be instructive to examine the market outside the United States for comparison.
It seems clear that location services are doing better outside the United States. For example, location technology vendor SnapTrack Inc., recently acquired by Qualcomm [QCOM] in January, launched what it called "the world's first mass market, high-performance, GPS-based mobile personal location service," in Japan with carrier NTT DoCoMo.
The "DokoNavi" service uses SnapTrack's server-assisted location system to provide location information to the user's handset, which is linked to a PDA. The user's location is displayed on an area map on the PDA screen.
That's a remarkably involved system, and NTT DoCoMo's ability to sell it might seem encouraging. However, Japan is a special case. Japanese cities are notoriously difficult to navigate. Street names are increasingly popular but still are far from universal. Instead, addresses have traditionally been written with respect to "chome," or urban districts. It's as if you gave a friend directions to your home by first giving him your ZIP code and then telling him what landmarks to look for.
Travel guides warn tourists to expect taxi drivers to stop several times en route to a destination for further directions. Indeed this is one reason why Japanese police are distributed into one- or two-man mini-stations at nearly every corner.
In that kind of environment, it's not hard to see why customers might snap up a service like DokoNavi. On the other hand, it lessens the service's value as a predictor of success in other markets.
There's also the European example to consider. Swedish developer CellPoint is offering its GSM-based location service to carriers in cooperation with the European branch of Yahoo [YHOO] under the name "Yahoo Find-A-Friend."
As the name suggests, the service is aimed at users, mainly teenagers, who want to keep tabs on their friends. In effect, it's an entertainment service. This contrasts sharply with the kind of applications usually suggested for location-enabled network: navigation, and tracking of everything that might be missing, from valuable assets to pets, children and Alzheimer's patients.
CellPoint admits to deliberately aiming its service at the youth market. Nor doubt the company has noticed that the largest users of short-message service -- another service that has made little splash in the United States despite huge success in Europe -- are in this segment.
While American teenagers may not be ready yet to track each other around the mall by cell phone, the Find-A-Friend service does suggest that the initial foot in the door for location services might be entertainment instead of the more useful applications developers suggest.
Consider, for example, a new company called Golflogix.com, which has applied a different kind of location system to golf. Under the company's vision, golfers would "tag" their ball with a satellite transmitter before and after each shot. The location would be shot to a satellite and tracked. When users got home they would be able to track their performance on a Web site, complete with maps of fairways marked with the flight of their ball.
Golflogix.com is still in the "seeking investors" stage and is screening who it talks to about its system. There doesn't appear to be a terrestrial wireless component, but there's not reason there couldn?t be. A wireless data terminal could use GPS to locate itself, and then send its data back over the terrestrial network.
Thus, we have what amounts to a location-based service, albeit a remarkably frivolous one. Still, the company realizes it is dealing with golf fanatics (and you know who you are). This is an affluent constituency know for spending absurd amounts of money on gimcracks promising some miniscule improvement in their scores. Golflogix.com probably will make some money with its service.
Whether or not the industry's vision for location services is in line with what customers are willing to spend money for, it seems increasingly clear that the mobile E-911 idea and revenue-generating location services are not the natural partners boosters thought they were.
CellPoint's Find-A-Friend service, for example, operates with an Internet component on a GSM location technology, which hasn't yet been approved by the FCC for meeting its accuracy requirements. Indeed those requirements are a moving target as backers of network- and handset-based location technologies spar for a favorable regulatory environment.
Instead of letting the business case for location services drive the creation of technology, the United States is defining the location market based on the public good of E-911, and then forcing commercial applications to fit into that structure. So far it isn't working.
Speaking to our sister publication, Wireless Today, CellPoint Vice President Lynn Duplessis, called the U.S. location market "ridiculously over-regulated." She added that CellPoint has "so much more opportunity in Europe because they're not so regulated."
Players in the U.S. market, like SnapTrack and Cell-Loc Inc., have long argued that the regulatory issues surrounding E-911 have frightened carriers away from large-scale implementation of location services. For one thing, the FCC mandate means that all carriers eventually will have to provide location capability everywhere. That alters market behavior considerably, creating disincentives that might not exist if carriers could choose where and when to deploy based solely on market demand and the strategic moves of their competitors.
Thus there is growing evidence that, while the FCC may someday succeed in getting its own version of location capability into the marketplace, revenues from sources other than FCC-mandated cost recovery, may be a long time coming. |
