Despite being the most popular and successful North American LBS application to date, generating a significant percentage of total LBS revenues, other opportunities exist beyond navigation, namely with location-enriched communications that leverage the inherent immediacy and presence power of the mobile network. T-Mobile US understands this...

While GPS enables traffic and navigation services, the core of the T-Mobile brand is about connecting our customers to the people who matter most.

TMo wants to

define and create experiences that enhance personal relationships and enrich all forms of personal communications, while also contributing to the value proposition of My Faves.

With the iPhone and Android there's a lot of focus now on location as an autonomous function and capability of the device, rendering the network to an irrelevant bit-pipe that has no role in the L part of LBS. That's certainly true for local search, navigation, publishing, and other device-centric Web applications, but TMo evidently knows that SIP-based immediacy in the network can be used in a way to add the "L" relevance back into the mix. Well done on them and werd up to my homey Tim Dunn.

According to VentureBeat, Hong Kong business mogul Li Ka-Shing says he's investing $100M in facebook for a Hutch 3G-supported mobile location-based version of the networking tool.  Why not invest in 51.com instead given its regional popularity...

Dr Batty says he's coming out of the woodwork soon to unleash his spatial networking invention onto the facebook masses.  In other developments, team FOKUS is equally boiling-up some pioneering broth to not only include geospatial contexts but others like presentity, unified calling & conferencing, and instant messaging coupled with geospatial. 

Socialight's volunteered views to psfk for their work in enabling UK cross-carrier Cell-ID Location cooperation needed for Mobile Social Networking, highlights the first rule non-exclusive need for LBS wares to traverse networks. Case in point—traffic transparency that we see today in the US and globally for SMS and MMS, but lacking for Location traffic.

For those unfamiliar with this UK Location history, carriers gathered together, identified a cooperative need for wholesale, and decided to collectively expose their data at different prices. What followed was an explosive build of start-ups launching what each marketed as cross-carrier LBS 'partnerships' and wholesale pricing claims towards innovation. Due credit however in reality belongs to Parliament and advocates, rather than to app providers still piggy-backing on the accomplishment. 

The below is a sample output of the initial effort, which today now seems like a bloated set of pricing for a commodity - one which US carriers still resist to offer up collectively. 

The SiRF Location 2.0 Summit last week deserves additional mention. It was a well-organized set of panels high in content and low in company marketing spin. One of the big macro themes of the conference was defining measurable benchmarks or challenges that need to be cleared for the broader LBS space to finally reach it's true potential. One area of discussion involved the key challenges still confronting LBS developers today. I wanted to throw out my top 4 list.

(1) Privacy. This is still one of the first hurdles to offering any location-aware service. Everyone knows it but few have it right. It will continue to be an point of strong focus after recent social networking child safety press. I would not be surprised if the majority of proposed LBS apps today are blocked from launch by carrier legal departments (for good reason). As an industry and in partnership, acceptable location privacy standards must be defined, supported and embedded in location access technologies. The CTIA and other wireless leadership groups are working through best practices; it remains to be seen how quickly carriers and vendors adopt these recommended policies.

(2) Location Cost. This continues to be a significant challenge to the launch of high frequency location-aware applications. The easy out is to claim the carrier's are charging too much for access to location information. The likely answer is more complex than that. I believe one of the largest reasons location is so costly today is initial location deployments were motivated by E911 requirements, bringing along a cost structure and complexity of implementation that is not required for the majority of commercial LBS apps. Hopefully, with the growing movement towards user plane and IP location solutions, location information will approach the ubiquity and cost of current DNS services. To date, mobile carriers have selected the same vendor to provide both emergency and commercial LBS infrastructure in general. Carriers separating the procurement of emergency and commercial location is one option that could reduce the cost of commercial location information.

(3) Mobile Device Fragmentation. Anyone that has built a mobile app has struggled to develop for and QA multiple handset form factors, seemingly random J2ME implementation bugs, and the challenges of getting users to download a mobile app. Some carrier environments are better than others (i.e. BREW), however the vast majority of handsets today present extreme challenges for an end user interested in paying for, downloading and running any new app. As a developer, it is a struggle to address a large customer base given the fragmentation of devices by carrier, network technology, vendor, mobile OS, etc. These challenges alone can explain the difference in $ market size of the PC software vs. mobile software industries. This is not a location specific challenge, but the device barrier is multiplied again by the varying levels of location API support from device to device, and carrier to carrier. This will not get better until carriers and device OEMs adopt more consistent and stringent requirements for mobile app runtimes and location API support. Nokia, Apple, soon Google, other smartphone vendors and (the hope of) mobile Linux appear to be targeting simplifying development across their mobile platforms. However, it will take some time to filter down to feature phones, and will continue to be a significant barrier to the broader adoption of LBS apps (or any mobile apps for that matter).

(4) Location Accuracy & Availability. Different location apps require different levels of location accuracy. The prevalence and availability of high accuracy A-GPS has clearly motivated strong interest in navigation services of late. However, there is a wide range of location accuracy when considering A-GPS to Cell-ID. For example, mobile social networking in general can make due with block level location accuracy (intersection of streets, in-between Cell-ID and A-GPS). Many social uses of location are also challenged due to weak GPS signal reception in urban or indoor areas. Availability of different levels of location granularity (and hopefully at different costs) would be a big boon to LBS developers. It is unclear how this will evolve since some of the strongest proponents of mobile LBS are directly vested in deploying A-GPS. LBS developers will need the support of both carriers and vendors to provide a broader set of location accuracies and to ensure availability across all environments.

There are obviously more challenges that the mobile LBS industry is facing. Working to solve these 4 would be a great start.

John Battelle's Web 2.0 Summit interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg offers up some impressive vision into the future of Facebook's aim to map the social graphs of its users, and subsequenty expose the data through a developer API.  Will the graph represent social network DNA through space abstractions, or the physical locations and interrelationships of people on/in the social network? 

I got a call late Friday night from a buddy in Manhattan asking if I'd heard the $160M finance round rumor for location-based social software start-up, and Sequoia venture-backed Loopt . After digging a bit more, the $160M number is wrong. In fact, Loopt's valuation is more likely close to $175M per a recent SEC filing according to sources close to the Stanford dorm-room company.

Following an additional weekend call with an application provider Loopt previously considered acquiring, I learned Loopt has surpassed 100K subscribers [all on Boost Mobile, with Sprint coming online soon]; a fraction of the existing Boost subscribers are paying customers [typical, considering Boost's pre-pay penny-strapped demographic]. Compare this accomplishment to an approximate 5% penetration rate for Verizon Wireless' subscribers using VZ Navigator, while tacking on a $9.95 MRC per sub for 3.5 million subs, and any reasonable mind would wonder how Loopt has bloated this valuation. Moreover, it's beyond most why Valley investors or potential suitors would pump out $175M into a company that sells a mobile social software for a $3 MRC, distributed exclusively through on-deck Carrier offerings.  It is not because there's a promising future in selling social software downloads on Carrier decks, especially considering individual Carriers are reluctant to support locator applications distributed by archenemies.  Furthermore, interoperable US mobile social wares augmented with Carrier-produced Location are simply too challenged due to a cross-carrier resistance to share Location openly across competing networks. Even if interoperable Location were possible in the near term similar to SMS and MMS transaction traffic traversing networks thanks to aggregator's like Verisign, there's still the challenge of charging for social software's. Users accustomed to using Web-based social wares simply won't adopt a pay-for mobile alternative in masses.

So perhaps Loopt's buy-in tact for this amount of cash is to play into the Facebook phenomenon and milk the investor influx headed this way already. There's no question social software's are hot; Facebook's $10B valuation is proof. With 43M sets of eyeballs it's no wonder why.  Sponsors are salivating over the opportunity to advertise to them all.  But Loopt doesn't have a Facebook 'for-free' support model yet, nor do they have millions of eyeballs.  So despite aspiring to become the de facto mobile social software provider with the competitive advantage via a mobile Location aggregation service and broker for all five US Carriers plus a few MVNOs, Carriers [namely the Bells] aren't going give this stuff away yet in an ad-subsidized model or cooperate with each other for that matter.  ...Perhaps Loopt's hopes of a hard-earned $175M might best be secured through the Web—a player with the means, will, planned transport, and a GPS handset to bypass Carrier resistance. Is there someone like that out there? If Dodgeball's debacle is any evidence, I'm skeptical, but wish the outfit my best nonetheless...

iPling , an iPhone designed SMS-based anonymous mobile social software tool, allows users to discover and communicate with other nearby iPling users while safeguarding privacy with anonymous identity abstractions.

Social networking has, up to now, relied on invitation systems. IPling changes the status quo by giving complete strangers the ability to find each other and interact with the confidence that they each control their own information and the experience itself. Until now, there has simply been no way to connect with others based on their proximity and interests unless they are already friends or friends of friends.

Identity abstraction is becoming quite popular—jaxtr is another MoSoSo that allows strangers to call your mobile via your preferred Social site without knowing your phone number.

-PR Newswire

Following a similar user-generated content capability announcement from TomTom last week, TeleNav introduced a series of v5.2 product enhancements including social software features such as inter-carrier location broadcasting, and user-published reviews and ratings for visited places. Unlike other mobile social software providers with distribution limited to a single network, TeleNav can effectively stitch together a social network fabric given their multi-network support across several deployments. Exclusivity to one network is not social.