Information Week had an interesting article where it predicted that
“Increasing availability of embedded GPS capabilities in mobile handsets will translate to a huge boom in location-based services, where revenue is expected to grow from $515 million to $13.3 billion in the next five years, according to ABI Research.” “ABI also parsed the LBS market into five segments: personal navigation, friend finder, local information searches, family-tracker applications, and fleet management.”
“The findings track with what mobile gaming software site GetJar sees among its customer base. GetJar said Thursday that GPS will help grow the mobile applications market.”
‘This will include both functional applications of the type we all know already, such as navigation, to much more elaborate GPS-based games, where the user location is central to game play,’ GetJar CEO Ilja Laurs said in a statement.”
” ‘Once services provided by one carrier are capable of seamlessly incorporating users from other networks, then the usage of LBS will be driven virally by the desire to respond to and interact with friends and family on other networks,’ the researchers said.”