I agree absolutely with Glenn Latham’s recent contribution to LBSzone.com (08/02/06). As do I on many occasions, Glenn asks why should we be paying ridiculously high data charges? It seems counter-intuitive that a business need to achieve market saturation is being addressed by exhorbitant pricing on new 2.5/3G network data services. It would be hard to argue that we’re still in the “early adopter” phase of mobile telephony, in which companies will typically charge a premium. Either device manufacturers are in cahoots with Telcos (supporting more bells & whistles that consume serious data) or the two segments are seriously out of whack. Either way, consumers are being led down the garden path.

I’m sure the synergies are obvious to the corporate accountants, however, without any Telco explaining the payback calculations for their mobile data networks why should we believe that such high costs are justified? I do understand the need to achieve suitable returns on investment, however, I’m finding it difficult to stay excited about the 2006 range of Wi-Fi and GPS enabled mobile phone handsets when I imagine the ARPU our Australian Telcos are targeting to milk out of me.

My simplistic mental arithmetic tells me that a greater volume of users would potentially yield similar financial results and would eventuate as a result of more attractive market pricing. My key argument is that by significantly increasing your audience, you also create further opportunities for value-added services such as LBS. Many LBS concepts will require a reasonable concentration of users in a particular area to achieve their potential. In the current market, particularly in little old Australia, that is still a long way off.

A casual peruse of various Australian Telco websites today once again highlighted prices for service “value-adds” that are disproportionate to the value that they really add.

With Optus recently announcing the availability of the Multimap and Microsoft Mappoint web service based FindA service, it was good to see a period in which usage was free. What was disappointing, however, was that it was only for one month, following which users are slugged AU$4.95 per month to access your typical ho-hum map-enabled directory service.

There is the option of paying for data usage instead of a flat monthly fee but given the service is graphically oriented, this is probably not a wise move for the geographically challenged. Telstra, as would be expected, don’t offer a flat rate for their equivalent service. It is advertised as “free *”, with the cost to the user coming in the form of data charges.

Arguably, this is yet another example of the hidden cost of map data in Australia. For Optus, royalties to PSMA, Multimap, Microsoft and obviously themselves result in a price, that by today’s standards, should get me about an hour’s worth of air time with the astronauts in the International space station. What Telstra’s excuse is, I don’t know. Perhaps i-mode is really killing them on royalties to DoCoMo.
I can’t see anything remotely appealing LBS-wise across the Telco offerings, especially for the prices they are asking. It is probably time to temporarily put my dreams of a Navteq / Google partnership on the back-burner (until they get over their video phase) and start looking towards an Australian equivalent to Navizon.

If you have not heard of Navizon, here is the 25-words-or-less introduction….

1. Download software to your GPRS, GPS and/or WiFi enabled mobile or PDA

2. Aimlessly wander the streets automatically detecting wireless access points or mobile phone towers in your defined area.

3. Automatically upload information on the location of these devices to a central server.

4. Use that information along with everyone else’s to identify where you currently are, based upon a database of known WiFi access points or mobile tower locations.

5. If you’re technically oriented, ‘wire’ this up to your normal mapping s/w instead of using a GPS receiver (useful for indoors, areas of poor GPS reception or if you don’t have a GPS receiver)

OK, so that’s more than 25 words but who ever could meet that limit and still make sense anyway!

For a more literate description, Navizon have quite a detailed technical overview.

Update 15/02/2006: I note that Optus now also offer their FindA service for $0.55c per 20 minutes usage.

Navteq have signed an agreement with PSMA Australia Ltd that will give the Chicago based company access to the quasi-Government organisation’s high quality Australia-wide map data. This agreement will facilitate the release of Navteq’s first Australian based navigation product.

Now that we are seeing large international players coming onto the Australian mapping scene, one could think that the next evolution will be for Navteq to leverage their existing relationship with Google in the United States to finally bring open-access LBS Downunder. Arguably, this seems to tie in very well with recent reports of increasing local development on Google Maps technology at their Sydney headquarters.

At this point in time, if I were a senior executive within Telstra’s Sensis division, I should be very nervous about such a deal weakening my company’s ability to dominate the Australian LBS market and to capitalise on my own in-house mapping IP. If Sensis’ operating costs are high and margins are low, Navteq could undermine the very closed strategies of Australia’s largest Telco by opening up an LBS platform to the local application development community.

My main doubt is whether Navteq had sufficient capacity to include possible alternative revenue models in their licensing agreement with PSMA Australia. PSMA’s basic dataset and per-unit royalty charges would not allow for a delivery mechanism such as Google Maps general non-commercial access. That is, unless the revenue derived from that service could in some way translate into a per-consumer charge for which PSMA can receive a royalty. I assume they would also create a commercial access license similar to what is available through negotiation with Google in the United States. If commercial pricing is attractive to smaller LBS application development businesses, this would certainly look like a winning combination.

I will remain hopeful. If this does all eventuate, let’s just hope that the pricing doesn’t send us back to Telstra cap in hand.

Navteq + PSMA + Google Maps could very well see Australian LBS come of age.

Today the LBS news drought has been broken within Australia. The Australian media reports that Google is increasing headcount at it local headquarters in Sydney, Australia. Google are reportedly hiring to increase work on the Google Maps technology which primarily originated (including the innovative Ajax interface) from Silicon Valley based, Australian firm Where2 LLC, acquired by Google in 2004.

Lars Rasmussen, founder of Where2 LLC, gave a keynote presentation in Sydney earlier this year, for the 5th International Conference on Web Engineering. Here is a brief introduction to Lars as can be found on the conference website. Rasmussen also gave an interview to ZDNET earlier in the year to talk about his past and future.

It’s certainly positive to see a continued investment in Australian software development talent. Unfortunately, however, there is no mention as to whether this investment will reach the dream of including local Australian map data with Google Maps.

Map data is hard to come by within Australia, due to the tight grip held on the limited market (by that I mean expensive, with high per-unit royalty requirements that almost kill the appeal for consumer focused applications) by Telstra and the quasi-Government body PSMA. Given Telstra’s recent attack at Google’s plans for world domination, it’s more likely that if we’re ever going to see a player such as Google enter the location based service market in Australia, it will be in partnership with PSMA.

I doubt anyone can go it alone.

The number of Google maps mash-ups online increases at a rapid rate. To keep an eye on this promising LBS genre, I recommend bookmarking Google Maps Mania.

http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/

Australia’s largest telecommunications firm, Telstra, has today released its vision for moving beyond mediocrity into a new era of profitability. This vision is one in which it is claimed that Telstra has more to offer in the Online search space than the likes of Google.

Delving deep into the myriad of powerpoint presentations and transcripts, there are few highlights, especially for the 10,000 workers to lose their jobs over the next three years. I’m impressed that a company which will lose 10,000 employees and still stay functioning, actually knows they have 10,000 employees to sacrifice. Clearly their HR department gave up counting years ago and opted to install turnstiles at the door. Mind you, “10,000″ is an impressive sounding number. Much more so than “1″ or “42″. All I hope is that included in that number there are those responsible for Telstra’s arguably self-destructive focus on extracting ridiculous returns from business customers and for forsaking the Australian public.

In my opinion, innovation is a lost art in their world. Like the large Australian banks who in the 1980’s gleefully slashed branch numbers and hiked fees to grossly enlarge their bottom line, only to reverse the trend in recent years, hoping their customers would forget, Telstra is now also implying a focus on customer service.

Any glimmer of hope that Telstra would open its Sensis division’s location services technology platform (WhereiS) to the general development community were crushed today, as the company sent a clear message that it will stop at nothing less than solo, World Domination.

Telstra’s vision for its Sensis division seems remarkably boring, unimaginative and lacking any of the public appeal (or detail) of LBS initiatives in the United States. I spotted what looked like a re-badged Tom-tom navigator unit on some powerpoint slides but that’s hardly the same as showing off a shiny Mio a701 running some form of open architecture LBS platform, is it?

If Sol thinks Google is “Google schmoogle�, he’d better start delivering the goods…..FAST!

If you’re going to go it alone with LBS, Sol, you had better give us subsidised GPS-enabled mobile handsets, free LBS software and cheap capped data rates. Then maybe, only maybe, will you be able to lure customers to your proprietary world. With that I would be happy to watch a few ads, just as I am with Google or Yahoo!

If not, I’ll race you for the throne myself! *sound of wild maniacal laugh*

Today I emailed Australia’s major telecommunications operators in an attempt to find out if anyone is even remotely close to investing in some serious LBS infrastructure. Not only do we have ZERO GPS enabled handsets on the market here, the best we have to offer LBS-wise is whereis.com.au. Now I don’t know about you but I think an electronic street directory is helpful, however, it’s not quite what I would call innovative or sticky. It’s also never a good sign when the best you can drum up as promotional material is a website providing locations to Australian public toilets and one other local government website. Next time the toilet in my home is broken, I’ll know where to go. Wouldn’t it make sense to have this available on handsets? Their technical API sections are also closed to the general developer world. Perhaps someone at Sensis (Telstra division) should re-consider this strategy in-light of the current results.

In a small, hyper-competitive market such as Australia, I would have thought the Telcos would be onto LBS pronto in an attempt to attract new customers to their networks and to also create new opportunities for generating advertising revenue. The reality is, however, that consumers are still paying exorbitant uncapped data charges even for the new 3G networks, with the exception of Hutchison’s 3 network. ‘3′ has a number of capped services which is promising but still no sign of LBS.

Data charges on mobiles are evil, make no mistake about it! In my humble opinion, it is obvious that most of the major operators are not prepared to risk erosion of their business segment for the benefit of the lowest common denominator (the average consumer). For those consumers always eager to live on the bleeding edge, they’re quite happy to hit them with high data charges and yet at the same time expect them to spend more time using their mobiles. What does that say about their perception of our intelligence?

I am hoping that voices such as mine will eventually be heard and that we will soon see innovation return to Australia’s telecommunications market. 3G is great stuff but not accompanied by exorbitant pricing and no innovation. If you take a look across all of the current 3G networks, there is next to nothing to differentiate their offering, except perhaps for some of 3’s interactive consumer oriented services such as chat (and no, I don’t work for ‘3′). Right now everyone still seems to be saying to me, “pay us lots of money so you can download media content, slower and of lower quality than what you can at home.”

I am not wishing to solely pick on Telstra, however as an example, given their current woes, one would hope to see a little creativity come from their general direction. If we examine their move into i-mode, we could infer that it is an attempt to create their own mini-web (a walled garden) based on the NTT Docomo model in Japan. Arguably it worked for Japan because the market for mobiles was far more advanced than the availability of Internet connectivity at the time (early 90’s). Hence their communications market evolved into a mobile handset oriented one instead of experiencing the early web boom that the rest of the world did. NTT Docomo effectively built their own closed-web in which participants had to pay to enter. If only we had a market of 47+ million subscribers, perhaps that would get us some attention too!

Will Telstra succeed? Not without innovation. Give us leading handsets, Felica and most importantly, give us Location Based Services! Sol, you may still stand a chance of tempting me to the dark side but you’ll have to be quick about it.

So now I will wait and see if there is any response to my query. I will keep you posted. If anyone has any inside information to share, please do!

*end rant*

 

Personally, I think Rabble is about to strike gold. Their investors seem to think so too - at least US$5.5m worth of gold to be exact. They will no doubt soon face stiff competition from those with much bigger budgets and more powerful mass media allies, however, Rabble seems to have realised early on in the piece, the power of allowing people to instantaneously share personal experiences with the world. It is blogging in its basic form, with the key difference being immediacy and location awareness.

When you’re out and about, suddenly wanting to capture that once in a lifetime event, or perhaps share a “here and now” feeling with someone half way around the planet, Rabble’s custom mobile application allows you to do so. The software ties a mobile phone camera and other input devices together, along with your stated location (entered as country / postcode / region etc.) in order to facilitate recording moments in time and publishing it all to blog space for other mobile and non-mobile users to access.

Imagine standing in the middle of your own town and being able to read, view and experience the thoughts and actual moments of many people before you. Surely, as with blogs today, there will be much noise to filter out but just knowing that you’re able to link information with the actual location it was created, is a powerful human experience. Imagine in decades or even centuries to come the treasures of information that could be linked back to an exact time and place.

I’m sure I don’t need to point out that this is currently only available in limited areas in the United States (isn’t everything?). I am confident, however, that once it catches on there, we’ll wonder how we ever lived without the immediacy of location-enabled, mobile blogging.

The Australian newspaper reports that an unsuspecting car thief in Perth, choosing the wrong car, i.e. one fitted with GPS enabled vehicle tracking, was tracked and arrested at his home within minutes. His bad luck was the good fortune of the owner and the techno-saavy WA Police Force.

It is always good to see my hometown in the media, especially when it relates to the use of GPS and location based services. Western Australia is a beautiful, relaxed place. In such an environment, those poor car thieves don’t stand a chance against that nasty vehicle tracking technology.

Before sometime tells me, yes I am aware that vehicle tracking has been in existence for many years. I just wanted to be one of the few people including non-US LBS related articles online.

I can see the early retirement of many common car thieves is not far off. Go Perth!