Identification of preconditions for an emerging mobile LBS market

Abstract

Location information has become a very important horizontal service component for a wide range of vertical mobile applications. This enabled multiple innovative mobile location-based services (LBS) that range from conventional mapping and navigation services featuring millions of points of interest (POI) to location-aware content delivery and mobile social networking. Providing a whole new world of opportunities for device and application vendors, network operators, content providers and prospective consumers, mobile LBS have potential to become one of the core businesses in today's mobile arena. However, the future of this market is not fully transparent due to several uncertainties associated with a mixture of technologies, service demand, consumer attitude, privacy aspects of using LBS and a complex value network. In this study, we identify and analyse a set of preconditions for an emerging mobile LBS market in its present evolution phase. The history of LBS motivates us to take a closer look at this emerging market and try to understand what the main reasons for LBS initial failure have been and what is still missing in this market today to emerge successfully. To focus on the most relevant issues, we construct our own research framework containing three main dimensions: technological advance and standardisation, value network and value proposition. Within these dimensions, we compare the early state of mobile LBS with the present situation and analyse the key factors presently crucial for LBS proliferation.