Let's say you are travelling on business and you are looking for a pizza place nearby, so you type in "Pizza" and ...

There was this interesting thread on the Yahoo-groups MoMo London mailing list the other day, about how come that location aware/based services have not really taken off on mobile so far. For years and years, they have been hyped as the prototypical use-case, the inevitable cash-cow of mobile services. At least outside Japan and South Korea, in 2007 LBS has still not fulfilled that promise. Invariably, historically and even still today when one reads about LBS the standard use case seems to be someone in an unfamiliar surrounding looking for a great restaurant nearby.

In thinking about LBS, this seems to be a very striking myth and perhaps one of the reasons why LBS is still in its infancy: most of us are actually in quite familiar surroundings most of the time. And if we are not, we tend to be with someone who is. Or have done our research prior to getting there, online; desktop-online that is. Hence, such a service offering will not drive regular, widespread adoption. That is not to say it is useless, it simply will not deliver the level of uptake required for LBS to be considered successful.

So it seems that for LBS to take off there need to be more reasonable customer propositions, and it seems there indeed are many good ones floating around out there, some of which are the following:

1) Updates and events based on my particular loacation and preferences; e.g. who is playing at a local favorite venue, what is on in a cinema near where I live, traffic information on the journey home, special offers in shops / restaurants I frequently go to. Add mobile coupons to this mix, and users might accept this into their daily lives. Of course it needs to be mostly pull, or an opt-in push, and a perception of being spammed needs to be avoided, but that seems like stating the obvious.

2) Location tagging: with exponential growth of people documenting their life online via blogs, myspace etc. users might see it as a nice feature to be able to keep track of where they went. A drive for exhibitionism (with sufficiently voyerism to match it) would surely overcome any privacy issues for plenty of users. Such a service would then e.g. display dots / lines on a map where the user has spent time, potentially with links to the appropriate blog entries. Example: WeHangHere

3) Location tagging part 2: people leaving comments about their favourite places or linking to blog entries; someone who passes by those places can see what others thought about it / experienced here. Digital graffitti.

4) Kids safety / emergency: parents tracking their kids / emergency services locating a person in need - as far as I know already widely used in Japan.


Of course, apart from the services the main pieces in the puzzle that are missing would be:

1) LBS lookup costs to decrease, in order for any meaningful margins / business cases to surface. Another ask to the carriers - surely one of them will lead the pack, 3 ("Tear down this wall, Mr. Fox") seems to be a likely candidate.

2) Devices supporting GPS: Nokia is leading with the N95. Again, Japan seems far ahead - legend has it, that all 3G phones shipped after April 2007 are required to have GPS support. By the way: whatever happened to Galileo, the EU version of GPS ? And are there any devices already in planning to support Galileo and / instead of GPS ?

3) As with all mobile internet services: cost transparency and data flat fees.

4) The local content needs to be complete: if 9 out of 10 stores / bars / cinemas / gas stations I pass are not listed, little enthusiasm is to be expected.