What is special about Geospatial?

There’s lots of talk that 2008 will be the year of location based services (see here, here or here). But will this ever become true? If we look back to the past years LBS was always a topic and a big hype was predicted.

Reiner Simon the author of no.5 blog has done some research about this (see the full article here: http://rainersimon.wordpress.com/2008/02/28/lbs-in-the-year-2008):

“I googled a little bit on that - and what did I have to see? I learned that 2007 could turn out to be the year of LBS. Or that LBS are finally poised to take off in 2006 and 2007. That 2005 will be a banner year for carrier deployments of LBS. Or that 2003 will mark a turning point for LBS as a market segment. Yes, the Web has mercilessly documented this long, sad story, starting back in 1997 (the year of LBS, by the way).”

In my opinion there are some scondary or enabeling technologies which are related to the success of LBSs:

• build in GPS receivers for the majority of mobile phones
• new approached and technologies for human computer interaction (HCI)
• open and fexible mobile frameworks and operating systems
• mainstream mobile broadband internet and fair prices from the providers

But the question which is mor interesting is: Will there ever be a mass market for LBS?

I agree on the author of no.5 blog, with this realistic view (among other positive facts, listed in his post):

“Will location based services take off by the end of the year? I doubt it. Yes, I agree that GPS will be the “new camera” (and Nokia’s commitment to put GPS in every N-Series model is a definite indication that we’re going that way). But I’m afraid we can also interpret this as “everybody’s going to have one, but few people will actually use it on a regular basis”. To be honest, I believe that the average LBS will never be able to reach a mass audience. (Did I just say that out loud?) Yes, there’s going to be a handful of exceptions in the navigation and local search arena. But those are already positioned clearly and visibly on the market today. Apart from that? I don’t think there’s going to be any “big” mass market LBS in practice.”

I’m asking myself is this so bad? Is it not enough that LBS answer specific questions for a limited number of users? I think that’s good enough and therefore I’m interested in location based decision support (LBDS).

[via no.5 blog]

Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.