Location Location Location ! If you keep track of latest tech news, you’d know that these days Location Based Services (LBS) are as hot as Pamela Anderson was during her prime. If you still need convincing, consider the recent acquisition of Plazes by Nokia. Or Verizon’s investment in Loopt. Or that Steve Jobs demo’d the Loopt app for the iPhone during his keynote earlier this year. Or just the amount of sheer coverage that LBS is getting is press and blogosphere.
To make up for my lack of knowledge about LBS, I set out on a mini-quest. To find out what LBS is all about. For those of who are interested, here’s a brief primer on location based services based on the research that I did.
Note: If you find any errors below, please feel free to correct me. I am not a domain expert in LBS
It goes without saying that LBS are based around a single context – location. Where are you located ? The premise being that if the location is known, app providers can easily pass on useful data to you. Useful because the data would be location relevant. What’s the closest Hookah bar or where’s the closest Mexican restaurant ? The potential and possibilities of such location aware services are endless.
But before we go into any of it, lets first look at the various ways using which, you can broadcast your location details. A location in LBS technology implies a latitude & longitude, so that you can accurately ‘located’ on a map.
1) Self Reported:
The most basic approach for determining the location of an end user is to have them report the location themselves. If users know their latitude and longitude, they can report it. Else, users can report a street address or an intersection and the onus falls on the service provider to decode that street address / intersection in to a valid location. One of the big drawbacks of this approach is that it depends on the level of user participation and the end user does a lot of the grunt work. Plazes is a location based service that depends on users self reporting their location
2) Network Triangulation:
Network based triangulation uses signal data from the three closest cell phone towers to identify the location of a user. The ‘triangulation’ concept is similar to the technology behind GPS. The only difference being that instead of satellites, data from cell towers is used for the triangulation. The drawback of this approach is the added algorithmic complexity needed to triangulate cell tower data. Not to mention that you’d also need a database of cell tower locations for some of these algorithms to work.
3) Cell Tower ID:
This is one of the simplest, but often imprecise, way of automatically determining the end user location. The data about the cell tower with which the mobile device is communicating is used to determine the location of the user. To use this method, you need to have a database about the physical location of all cell towers so that you can do a lookup for the cell tower id received from the mobile device. For all you geeks out there, here’s how you can retrieve the cell tower ID on S60 3rd edition platforms.
The drawback of this approach is that it provides an approximate location of the user. Secondly, locations of cell towers is network proprietary information and 3rd party databases of cell tower locations are not quite exhaustive.
4) GPS:
GPS is one of newest and one of the most precise methods to determine a user location. Triangulation data used from satellites is used to locate a user. Use of this method requires that the mobile device have a GPS chip in it, that can receive GPS broadcast signla.s The problem is that only few of the most recent cell phones in the market have GPS capability in them. And GPS is reported to drain the cell phone battery like crazy.
Location Based Services in India:
India is the world’s second largest mobile market. So, where exactly are the location based services in India ?
The only Indian deployment of location based services that I’ve heard is the recent announcement from Bangalore based Yulop. Yulop seems to be using the Cell Tower Id method to determine the user location. It’d be interesting to find out how they determine the physical location of the cell towers. I’m not aware of any publicly available database for India, which has physical locations of cell phone towers. If such a database exists, please let me know.
Besides Yulop, I’ve also heard of reports that users have successfully used Google’s MyLocation feature in Mumbai.
GPS is yet to take off in India and GPS enabled phones are still not very common, which rules out GPS has an effective method to capture location of an end user.
It’d be interesting to see some innovation and Indian startups emerge in this area. After all, with the world’s second largest mobile population, it would not only serve as an awesome sandbox, but a potentially huge market as well.
PS: A few weeks back, TechCrunch had an awesome article on the various technologies in Location Based Services. The article is not only much more detailed and technical, but it also comes from a domain expert (Eric Carr from Loopt).
I have been using Google Maps’ MyLocation feature for quite some time in India in various cities. I have yet to come across any other LBS application in India. If some one knows and has used one, let us know.
Pranav,
I have been a silent reader of your Feeds,its very impressive with the way its been carried on…thanks for all the updates you have been providing with Indian Startup community.
Coming back, anytime LBS is spoken about i am always excited, we @ Yulop figured out a way to bring about LBS to India 12 months back, its been a herculean task till date, but yes we ave publicly gone ahead in saying we have the LBS ready and working for city based needs……probably people in Bangalore who are interested could also contact me for a private Demo…. its only a strategic decision not to have it in public beta yet.
My 2 cents about LBS in India
> The first thing to be sorted is to geotag every entity and identify them with respect to Lat. and lon…. the key in here is to identify what should be geo tagged and how could this be deployed.
> Looking froward ,the crux being how to locate the user [i am only mentioning about Mobile access], yes the option being the GPS or the most common Cell ID, there isn’t been any publicly available Cell ID, but we have mapped every Cell ID for 6 cities irrespective of the operator [i can explain you this offline
] along with 6 city Geo tagged data.
> But what i personally feel is waiting for another 12-18 months, when every high end user would have a GPS enabled phones and Operator shouldn’t be a bottleneck.
> Anyways to access this service we know, we got to have GPRS enabled service from the operator, which in itself is a biggest bottleneck with penetration, all these are expected to change in few months when GPRS is available for every college student and Housewife [ I have heard about GPRS tipping point : early 2009]
> But until GPRS or for that matter GPS is to be available with everyone we really can’t be holding our business, hence the approach of SMS is also been made available where we identify user based on the SMS.
I am happy to take the note ” LBS is a hot cake” at least for next decade, I feel every entity on this earth would have a location and building killer apps should be need of the hour.
We at Yulop are in the middle of launching something very unique yet very significant related to LBS for India in coming days, probably before it is been released i would be happy to get your feedback
Look forward for Geo India
I’ve heard of a lot of LBS companies working on applications for the Indian population. I think the launch of the app store for the iPhone will spark a lot more talk, and hopefully action, about LBS in India. There will be hundreds of apps available in the app store. One can only speculate about the exact apps that will be featured. I’ve heard rumors about WHERE being a featured app in the app store. Hopefully those guys at WHERE are working on an India-based application. It’s be cool to get Buddy Beacon to my friends in India to see what they’re up to.
@sridhar,
thanks for stopping by and provide your perspective. The one thing I’m wondering about — what if a self reported approach is taken in India till GPS – GPRS becomes pervasive ?
It would be interesting to see how well its embraced by the mobile savvy indian population. Of course, this is till the GPS-GPRS void gets filled in.
Meanwhile, I’d definitely like to connect offline to see how you collected the cell tower data
good luck to you guys man.
@jason
can you point me to some these companies that are working on LBS apps for India ?
Hello there … excellent article.
I’d also add Reliance’s investment in Pelago (considering its relevance to India)
Based on initial impressions, seems like Whirrl (Pelago) is one of the more promising iPhone based (LBS) social networks along with Loopt’s new product for the iPhone.
As for Indian LBS, it’s something which is an obvious need … I feel MapmyIndia has done a good job. Yahoo and Google are getting there … , it will still be pretty difficult. I’d love to see a communal effort .. almost a social geotagging service with some sort of incentive. Door to door geotagging is possible but would be a massive undertaking. Yulop…claims to geocode locations? I wish them all the best, but am wary on how accurate they will be .. especially when using triangulation.
@Nav – yes, the pelago investment did come to mind when writing this post. However, I wanted to keep things specific just to the indian context. thats why i neither mentioned about loopt or sense networks etc.
While the social effort does sound interesting, I dont think it would entice a lot of folks. After all, everyone wants to keep their commercial interests first. So, if Yulop has geocoded locations, they’ve spent quite some time and effort to get the first mover advantage. For strategic reasons, I dont think they’d want to share this info with others.
I believe we all must are aware of Android – Google OS for Mobiles. There are lot of LBS – including one developing myself. Some of the applications are fascinating. It does not require any work from user. There is background process which can do all these work, track user interest and display places that he is interested in. It uses build it GPS. I believe India has to wait for a year or two to mature to GPS. Between what is the amount of power that GPS chips drain ?
Pranav,
Nice article on LBS and its state in India. We at LocationGuru, certainly believe LBS is closer to reality than ever…my take – you’ll start hearing/using services as early as middle of next year.
While you are following companies focussing on LBS in India, you may want to check us out at http://www.locationguru.com.
Hi all,
I think there is a very good name in the LBS framework which is Gypsii. This is a pretty decent mobile social networking site operating on the LBS framework.
You can visit gypsii.com for further details. The future of LBS is clearly dependent on the kind of applns that could be designed around it. Possibly in the month of September you could see some action with a company launching this service on a grand scale…..