Location Based Services are all the rage now. Everyone is into them, its the new buzz word, the new word that the VC herd gravitates towards, THE way that everyone is going to make money.
But what is it? Its actually a umbrella group of different services, across a range of fields including criminology, social, travel, and parenting, all related to the location of the user. How does it work? The user is located through the GPS in the device he carries, and information delivered (not necessarily to the user) based on where he is.
Well that's a little scary...the carrier always knows where you are, assuming you are outdoors somewhere. Sounds like 1984 right? In fact, there was a famous case in London where someone was acquited because there was a record from the carrier of alleged perpetrator via the GPS that he was too far from the victim within 3 minutes of the murder. So that's a good thing!
On the other hand, think about some of the social applications that are so touted using GPS. You are in a restaurant, and you are alerted that your friend is around corner. OK, that's kind of cool. But what if its not your friend by your boss who is sitting in a restaurant and is alerted that his employee, who called in sick, is sitting in the same restaurant. Of course, you can opt out, but what if you forget...Some of the more well known applications are Google's Latitude, Shizzow and BrightKite. Even LinkedIn has a cute app called TripIt which lets you put in your trip details and find your friends/colleagues going to the same places.
I'll talk more about other applications in my next post. Incidentally, ABI research claims that LBS social networking will become a $5.5 billion market. But, NOT the way we think now. Stay tuned for the next post.
