Location Based Services (LBS)

Your mother or girlfriend may not know where you are sometimes but be assured that your telco has a pretty good idea of where you are at any one time. Phone companies keep track of you through your mobile phone signal. This has led to an entire area of applications and services that are built around your location. Hence the name by which they are known: location based services or LBS.

There are two ways by which telcos keep track of us. Mobile phone signals are built to lock onto the nearest available base station. So by knowing where your phone is making or receiving calls from, phone companies have a pretty good idea of where you are.

The telco won’t know exactly where you are but it would your general location. This has been good enough for telcos to launch services like Friend Finder. This service will tell you, for example, that your friend or family member is in the vicinity of KLCC.

GPS would be needed to know your exact location. The Global Positioning System which works through a chip embedded in more advanced phones communicates with a satellite and it can pinpoint your exact location. The SiRF Star III chipset is probably the most commonly used in most GPS enabled phones.

If you have a GPS enabled phone you could utilize a location based service such as road navigation. With the right maps loaded onto your mobile device, the GPS service can plan out the best route you could take to any destination. Since the GPS system will know exactly where you are at any point of time, the map would be dynamic and you can see your location moving all the time.

Experts believe that as more phones become GPS enabled, a lot more location based services will spring up. For example, I could be anywhere and simply type in ‘food’ and a LBS service could bring up a list of all the restaurants near where I am standing. Or banks and petrol stations if I so wish.

GPS and phone signals are not the only type of signals that location based services can be built on. Bluetooth is also a possible LBS enabler. When the Bluetooth on your phone is switched on, another Bluetooth device could know you are nearby and possible services could be built but on a smaller radius than the earlier mentioned technologies.

For example, in Singapore, when you enter the Plaza Singapura shopping mall, there are signs encouraging you to switch on your Bluetooth and made yourself visible. If you do that, promotions and advertisements will be pushed to you as you walk around the mall.

All these services are fine and good but they do bring up privacy issues and lead to unsolicited marketing gimmicks. Imagine walking around somewhere and being bombarded by continuous advertisements from nearby retail outlets. Not everyone is going to be happy with that.

If my phone keeps beeping nonstop because of push ads, I would be annoyed to no end. Shopping would no longer be a quiet affair. It is bad enough to deal with the massive email spamming; you can add mobile spamming to it as well. So some  form of control and guidelines would be needed to make sure LBS services do not end up becoming bothersome to users.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in US has already taken some steps to control push ads. The ads are only allowed to flash themselves when users actually go through a short confirmation process as push ads are considered spam. Unless you really want to know more about what an ad could offer, you can just ignore it with a push of a button.

Thus while LBS services would probably lead to more advertisements they would be permission based instead of being random and indiscriminate.

Thankfully, LBS services would not only be about marketing and ads. Another good application for the technology would be the FCC’s second initiative dubbed E911. Mobile service providers are required to disclose a caller’s telephone number to emergency dispatchers. That would mean that police, firemen and paramedics would have no excuse to arrive late.

In our country, with our crazy road systems and disappearing signboards midway on journeys, GPS maps might just prove its worth in the long run.  For now however, I will play the wait-and-see game and rely on friends. But I am preparing for the day when my boyfriend or editor will know exactly where I am anytime. Sigh…