Multimedia computer manufacturer Nokia announced their first automotive infotainment device today—the 500 Auto Navigation. Sporting bluetooth connectivity, an FM transmitter, and an MP3 player, the infotainment device trumps dedicated, offline P-Nav GPS devices with bluetooth-enabled mobile phone connectivity to the Web, while discounting value for in-dash radio and digital audio players.  Will this type of all in-one vehicle device enable new types of georeferenced multimedia content to augment static points-of-interest map databases, as well as points defined by user communities?  Imagine all those photos, video, audio reviews and the like that could enhance and personalize what is otherwise a generic and mundane commute to work and back. 

What types of LBS services would you offer if you were able to track (with profiles) 12.4M people in a city? Looks like China is going to find out as part of a "Safe City" initiative.

-Venture Beat

Tele Atlas' partnership announcement with The Travel Channel is the latest in a recent series of indicators of traditional Media's growing interest in mobility and location-based services.  The announcement arrives following previous suggestions that successes of mainstream insertion into a myriad of mobile and online mediums, will present new opportunities for map content providers to pursue partnerships with other media and content companies who layer-on additional multimedia value.  Other previously referenced industry successes and indicators of this emerging trend include the BBC effort in the UK, south Florida's 93Rock collaboration with LOC-AID, and Lonely Planet's entrance into LBS. 

I don't think the larger ecosystem beyond diehard telecom enthusiasts and industry analysts really understand what is coming and how it will change everything. People… read the Xohm tickler. A true wireless Internet is coming, and it's not your grandfathers Internet with devices we already use to read and write on the Web. No, it's more than phones; more than laptops. You know those people who make chips? The chips that connect and process? Well imagine putting those chips into anything and everything that can be charged with electricity. Now imagine all those chips containing GPS silicon, with local fallback Location options as well.  Layer on broadband speed, an SDK, and an open business model.  Get the picture? 

AT&T wireless has apparently contacted RIM and threatened to discontinue business operations unless RIM locks the upcoming Blackberry 8820 GPS capability to all applications except TeleNav.  This is the type of domineering power-hungry carrier-control attitude that boils the blood of innovators and early adopters to no end, creates negative association for LBS, and breeds anger among the developer community at large.  AT&T's reasoning?  Fear of the RIM 8820 upstaging Apple's iPhone.  Now that's "fair" competition. 

Russell Beattie penned a post today detailing why Consumer LBS applications "are a black hole of wasted time, effort, money, and opportunity".  Strong words for sure, but the reasoning sound, enforced by the following bulleted arguments which I've paraphrased:

• LBS is not magic - suggesting that positioning technology is still kluge
• Location isn't really that important - suggesting that the perceived added value of location specific to IM, Messaging, and Social Networking doesn't add a tremendous amount of context not already present in these communications tools
• My gadget's location isn't always relevant - suggesting that a photo tagged with location might appear at a certain point on a map, when the intention was to tag the photo of the object which might be a mile away from the mapped position
• We're all paranoid - suggesting a majority of surveyed soccer Moms think child finder applications can be hacked by predators
• Interesting LBS apps are niche apps - suggesting the most promising consumer LBS applications are the long tail variety targeting niches - Bones in Motion, a "running" application, is given as an example

Russell highlights some good general points, and the observations for consumer application worthlessness deserve a bit more detail to reinforce the arguments. First, at a high level... 

To date, the majority of revenue generating LBS applications aren't in the consumer space, but rather in industry vertical markets where the usefulness and ROI has proven itself time and again across industries including [but not limited to]  Education, Field Services, Utilities, Government, Insurance, Retail, etc..  And because there's an ROI in these fields for work order management, field service automation, or customer service, this by default makes LBS applications valuable as money saver, versus a money maker. That said, here are my specific comments on consumer LBS. 

The consumer LBS market has not emerged - period.  Developers fixated on the consumer LBS market have made one fatal mistake over the years - they've all looked for that one chasm-crossing killer application to secure a mass market following, when in fact there isn't a single end-all, be all killer app, but rather lots of killer apps extending into the niches.  A quick sampling of the GIS market will teach you this, and so will Chris Anderson's The Long Tail.  If this fundamental principle is understood, it's quite easy to abandon a consumer holy grail quest and accept the fact that a feature [like Location] should be valued as such - similar to the way we value caller ID.  It was once a premium pay-for service and now we simply expect it to always be there, for free. 

The above said, let me comment on Russell's specific bulleted list as it relates to consumer opportunities:

• LBS is not magic - I don't expect a solution to emerge that will fix positioning technology problems.  I can however suggest that emerging multi-bearer handsets promise to remove location aiding calculation processes from networks and insert them client-side, thereby introducing QoS fall-back options which should improve user experiences   
• Location isn't really that important - I would argue that location does offer contextual relevance to communications, but perhaps not in the way of a real-time presence indicator that augments what is already available, but rather introduces affinity and belonging to a local community of interest.  User-created and published community content is what I'm thinking...   
• My gadget's location isn't always relevant - No argument here. If it's not relevant, don't use it.
• We're all paranoid - "all" is a bit strong.  Plus, the example given is a tracking service.  I'll submit that no one wants to be invasively tracked, but if given the option to publish or broadcast, will feel a sense of control and empowerment with the service. 
• Interesting LBS apps are niche apps - I totally agree and subscribe to the long tail theory - a theory that says niches are good and profitable. Let's see more niche apps! Bring em on. By the way, Spencer is a good pal of mine as well and I use his app religiously [not for running, but for snowboarding].   

Qualcomm touted a shipment of 300 million GPS chipsets worldwide today. Sources suggest adding another 250 million to that tally by aggregating other competitive GPS silicon providers to the mix for total global chipset shipments. So, that’s approximately 550 million GPS chipsets deployed in various consumer electronic devices currently in active circulation. 

The below LBS History and Milestone chart [a piece I crafted for the IFTF] calls out an industry milestone of 250 million GPS chipsets shipped in October 2006, denoted by the orange arrow. In less than one year, we’ve doubled that count. To put it another way, recent GPS chipset penetration and gross adds in the last year equalled the same gross add growth over the course of the previous 6 years! Did we recently and silently totter over a tipping point?

Chris Silver Smith has posted an informative article on geolocation and click-fraud detection at Search Engine Land. It is interesting to note the various players going after this space and the variety of location determination approaches.

Mobile location is not handled in depth specifically. However, the proxying challenge associated with mobile carrier data networks is noted as a barrier to using traditional reverse location lookup on the IP address. Skyhook Wireless and Mexens Technology (Navizon) do make article appearances.

The article is primarily focused on the accuracy of the geolocation results. However, even with 90-95% accuracy and errors greater than 20 miles at times, there is a growing market for more geolocation vendors and solutions. A large amount of mobile LBS is focused on higher accuracy location. It is nice to see much fuzzier location determination generating some value. Makes you wonder how creative developers could be with even accessible cell-id in the US ...

It’s not often you hear publicly from the modest and humble HP Jin of TeleNav. I spent the better half of an hour with him at Phoenix International Airport about 4 years ago [we were both waiting for a connecting flight to Orlando for CTIA], and he’s a pleasure to talk to and has a great sense of humor. Still, he doesn’t speak publicly often. When he does, it’s deliberate.

GPS World’s coverage of TeleNav’s recent survey-results outcry, which accuses PND suppliers of offering outdated offerings leading to consumer dead-ends, indicates HP has something to get off his chest with regards to the battle of the navigators. He and Sal [the other co-founder of TeleNav] blast the PND market, and criticize Tele Atlas of pursuing conflicts of interest per their recent sale to TomTom, TeleNav’s perceived archenemy.

Now, I don’t think this whole PND vs. mobile phone, carrier-distributed & billed vs direct to consumer & billed is an either-or consumer decision… Case in point, consider Dash. All they did was put a modem in a PND, and viola—a connected device just like a phone that no longer suffers from outdated map data or connectivity. The point is this navigator battle can go any direction [pun intended]. TomTom could build a phone or connect their devices, Apple could offer iPhone on-board navigation with data synched from iTunes, TeleNav could continue on their Carrier/mobile OEM path, Google or Nokia could come along and change the whole game by giving it away for free, or another small stealthy player could be reinventing the model as I draft this post. In the end, consumers and especially digital natives may have a PND, a phone, an iPod, a PC, a PMP, and so on. As long as they are given choices, they’ll choose the best option for their lifestyle.

Inadvertently validating competitive threats by bashing them secretes scents of fear for others to sniff-out and embrace as psychological marketing arsenal. It’s better to say something like "the product fails to address the needs of connected users which we have spent that last 6 years engineering to perfection, etc”.  TeleNav's negative bash-fest material is somewhat disappointing... 

Dr Mark Wright of the Informatics Dept. at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland has built a service that allows users to point and shoot their digital camera phones at structures in and around Edinburgh and send the photos to a centralized local database of superimposed virtual art.  The service then renders the superimposed multimedia image back to the users mobile device.  Dr Wright is hoping to repurpose the Microsoft Photosynth-like application as a way of adding context presence to blogs.  All of this sounds candidly similar to Nokia's MARA [Mobile Augmented Reality Applications] R&D project which is theoretically the closest thing I've seen to a Tricorder.