Despite the disruptions caused by the volcano eruptions in Iceland 2 weeks ago, approximately 140 attendees from across the LBS ecosystem made it to Amsterdam for the Location Business Summit April 28th and 29th, including over 40 senior-level presenters from T-Mobile, Orange FT, Vodafone, Intel, Qualcomm, Ogilvy, BBC, Dell Computers, Google, Yahoo!, Nokia and others.
There was a heavy emphasis placed on revenue models, and considerable attention given to the mobile web, advertising and the social component of location. There is a clear “Race to Place” according to Scott Seaborn of Ogilvy, as companies and advertisers are racing to incorporate location and mapping into their products and services and advertising campaigns.
The GeoWeb vision of a location-aware Web is simple in concept, and somewhat more complicated in execution, as the LBS ecosystem and value chain still remains complicated. It is a B2B2B2B2C chain with evolving business models and interoperability challenges between devices, applications, and mobile carriers still to resolve. Business model discussions revolved around a number of strategies and successes from “location as services” to the traditional licensing model and professional services as companies seek to implement LBS strategies and solutions from integration into new products and services, and from integration into enterprise business intelligence and operational performance initiatives.
The consumer market continues to drive the adoption of LBS as mapping and navigation services are made freely available by Google, Nokia, Apple, and OpenStreetMaps, as examples. However, as this data flows across the wireless and broadband networks, and interoperability issues between devices, applications, and networks remains an issue; some presenters and panelists indicated that the communications carriers might yet be a wildcard in the evolution of the market.
