The Holy Grail of LBS

Location based Services have entered the mainstream. Personal Navigation Devices in cars are ubiquitous and personal navigation on the phone is already a big business. Nokia alone is going to have over a hundred million GPS enabled devices across the whole product range in the market by 2010, challenges like battery live and slow positioning technology have been solved to a satisfying extent.

Now Location based services are about to get social, considered by some as the holy grail of LBS. Everyone is in the starting blocks to grab a piece of the pie, innovative start-ups, the operators with millions of customer relations and the handset manufacturers who put the ultimate gateway in our hands. And why are the big ones like Facebook missing the train so far? What is the ecosystem going to look like and how do we overcome major obstacles including privacy, signal vs. noise and user experience on the fourth screen?

Felix Petersen is giving his perspective on things, both as co-founder of one of the pioneering startups in this space and as an employee of the dominating handset manufacturer aggressively pushing towards a vertically integrated end user experience.