Location Business Summit 2012 - Location based advertising and augmented reality

At Location Business Summit 2012, different examples of location-based marketing were given by Asif Khan, from LBMA. Below are some of those videos presented.

Bettle, trying to create advertising as impressive as the car.

Granata Pet - Snack Check-in for your dog.

Roqbot, a social jukebox and background music service for bars, restaurants, cafes, gyms, retail chains and other public venues.

Musical fitting rooms from Starhub, promoting your music download service

This one is from Thomas Alt, CEO, Metaio; augmented reality marketing campaign for Audi A1

Or this one for tablets

The interactive TV show or making the TV screen a huge touchscreen example was impressive. With the help of your smartphone and augmented reality, you can participate and respond to questions in a quiz, get individual feedback on their results and compare their performance with that of other viewers. Here is the video in German with English subtitles.

See also

• first part of the Location Business Summit 2012 posts.
• Location Business Summit 2012 - Operators' point of view
• Location Business Summit 2012 - indoor positioning

Location Business Summit 2012 - Indoor Location

Google Maps 6.0 for Android

Indoor location is expected to change the marketplace radically and we heard a lot about it during Location Business Summit 2012 from both platform players like Google and vendors providing solutions to achieve indoor positioning.

Steve Gray, CTO from CSR presented a nice overview of the technical alternatives for indoor positioning. He presented two major solutions, wifi and cellular signal footprinting and pedestrian dead reckoning.

For the signal fingerprinting method, one option is to use an enterprise class wifi and positioning center from vendors like Cisco, which uses angle of arrival, time of arrival or signal strength etc to calculate position. A cheaper alternative is given as using the existing wifi and cellular signals in the environment.  After fingerprinting the environment, position is determined by interpolating the finger print data from database. After the initial finger printing, database is fed with the data from users to allow the system to adapt to the radio changes in the environment.

Apple’s blockage on the RSSI API preventing the applications to see the wifi signal strength level around is given as the major blocking issue for this method. Most consider that Apple is saving it for themselves for their own indoor positioning solution.

Many criticized Google about their indoor positioning quality saying that their data is based on the cars driving around the buildings which is not good for deep buildings like malls and airports. It looked like most (except Google) ignore Google’sMap Floor Plan Marker, which enables Google to have the indoor radio fingerprint by volunteered users. Someone mentioned that Google is also biking indoors too.

Sensewhere says fingerprinting is expensive and labor-intensive while sensor-based positioning can impact the power consumption radically. They say their “dynamic crowd sourcing” system is the solution which is completely fed by the people walking in the building with no need of initial fingerprinting of the building. Though they did not provide any technical details, they were so confident about their solution.

CSR talked about PDR which is using kinematics to estimate indoor positioning as an alternative solution to the problem. It is said that micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) made it possible to determine accelaration and velocity of device. The problem with this method is the error accumulating over time / steps, introducing the need of synchronization with some known source / location from time to time.

CSR also mentioned about the recent BlueTooth v4 protocol, which can push some information (like coupon) to the phone or wake up an application. They say this interface is supported by most of the upcoming phones, including recent ones like iPhone 4s.

See also:

• First part of the posts about Location Business Summit 2012
• Location Business Summit 2012 - Operators' point of view
• Location Business Summit 2012 - Location based advertising and augmented reality

Location Business Summit 2012 - Operators' point of view

While there were few operators participating to Location Business Summit 2012, their point of view was discussed by TCS and Vodafone at panel.

Kristian Nylund, CEO, TCS stated that precision of network-based positioning is enough for 90% of the applications and services and handset- / application-based location can be spoofed easily for iOS and Android. He thinks that operators can differentiate themselves from OTT players with the use of network-based positioning with services like secure location (or shadow authentication) making sure that right device is being used at right location (no data roaming in China, but only during work related trips like Amsterdam visit).

O2 UK’s Priority Moments platform was brought to topic a couple of times as an example of successful operator service about location and marketing. It is a platform by O2 providing exclusive offers and special experiences from the brands you know and love, straight to your phone. Another service example was a service from a French operator which allows subscribers to be able to see the last known location of their lost phone on map. It is said both services is working at Cell ID level.

Maybe because of lack of wider contribution by operators, I heard nothing about Cell ID + TA based positioning but only Cell ID based positioning. Vodafone stated that their solutions like fleet / asset management or family finder is Cell ID based.

In response to privacy related questions, Vodafone told about their opt-in subscriber positioning permission database. If the subscriber is not asked about his preference before, he is getting an SMS when he’s about to be positioned by a service / 3rd party. He is positioned only if he replies to the SMS to confirm the positioning.

After Vodafone mentioned about their own SUPL server implementation, Google’s and Apple’s SUPL servers was taken to the discussion by the participants, noting that operators cannot use their own SUPL server with iPhone.

When it is asked, Vodafone was giving Mobile Analytics empowered by their large user base with segments like device, age groups etc as the next revenue source.

Analytics issue is highlighted by Qubulus too, giving Euclid Elements and Path Intelligence as example companies.


See also

• first part of the Location Business Summit 2012 posts.
• Location Business Summit 2012 - indoor positioning
• Location Business Summit 2012 - Location based advertising and augmented reality

Location Business Summit 2012

Location Business Summit 2012 was held at Amsterdam at May 22-23. Besides participating in the event for the first time, it was also my first time in the city. I enjoyed not only the city, but also the summit with its both technical and business oriented content. Various topics were presented during the summit by the diverse range of participants. In a series of posts, I will try to cover the most of the topics discussed.

Amsterdam by Claude Monet

Platform players and content providers

After Google’s presentation which is not touching any features or roadmap of their products, Microsoft’s presentation made their products look like “me too” product. Microsoft mostly mentioned about the example use cases by 3rd parties using their platform, Bing Maps.

OpenStreetMap came to the scene providing their numbers like 600K registered with 4% actively contributing users. They tried to make it clear that the quality of their maps is more than enough, still adding the quality of the corporate users’ contributions is much better. Different use cases like, OpenCycleMap, RollStuhlRouting or NavFree were presented. Usage OpenStreetMap is free in contrast to others which can charge for high volume usage. You only need to share it, if you enrich their data. You still can keep your private data private, if you are presenting it on a layer.

TripAdvisor took the attention with some statistics in the beginning of the presentation, both from their own and the market's. Their application is being downloaded 25 times per minute, while they have 23M unique users and 600M reviews/opinions in a month.

Saying 43% of the people research travel via mobile and 94% research for local activities, he exemplified some of the features of their mobile application like audio tours, self guided tours or trip ideas as well as top rated POIs, tailored for different segments and tastes.

TripAdvisor also talked about their JSON API which is for only selected partners and their mobile widget for hotels which do not have mobile experience.

“Location is a great contexual filter, but it is not enough”

This was a quote from Ed Parsons of Google. Saying the filter should be extended to have both intent and personalization in addition to location to make the LBS individual, he added soon each Google Maps will be unique.

Paul Berney from Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) added time to the filters to complete the “contextual relevance”, who/where/when/what. He was saying the restaurant search should be returning different results for different times of day as: highlighted the SoLoMo buzz word adding that the social filters provide more help to the users, like they value reviews of the friends more than others. MMA also quoted Gerd Leaonhard, “Advent of mobile and social is the end of lying”.

TripAdvisor was highlighting their features which are tailored for different segments and tastes.

Roaming

It was interesting hearing that much about roaming during the Location Summit as a former Technical Product Manager responsible for roaming products and location enablers at Turkcell Technology. It was either both mentioned by the presenters and asked by the audience.

In response to a question, Malvinder Jutley from Vodafone was telling that they cannot perform positioning while the subscriber is abroad.

Roaming came to the topic mostly during discussions about content, like TripAdvisor. After providing statistics like 55% of the EU travelers used smartphone while abroad and 58% turn data roaming off, TripAdvisor was saying their users want “something that is content rich, easy to use and practical while roaming”. While their application can provide the content offline preventing roaming charges to the subscriber, it turned out that they also work closely with the operators to integrate HPLMN operators’ data roaming package ads in their application.


See also

• Location Business Summit 2012 - Operator's point of view
• Location Business Summit 2012 - Indoor location
• Location Business Summit 2012 - Location based advertising and augmented reality

Roaming market: tougher times lead to innovative solutions

Roaming market is tougher than ever with the increasing regulation on the business. Considering that the European commissioner is calling roaming business as “rip-off”, we can conclude that it will not be getting any better but worse in the future.

While the operators are trying to control the expenses with more strict steering of outbound roamers, they are also trying to stimulate the usage by detecting the idle roamers and offer them different roaming packages. It is not a mystery now that the usage did not increase to the same extent as the decrease of the pricess.

Another way to increase roaming revenues can be to increase the number of roamers besides stimulating the usage. This may not make sense in the first instance, till you hear that in most of the countries almost one over three of the outbound roamers have roaming disabled when they leave the country. The rate may not be this high for European operators because of ease of travel between countries, but it is still a surprising number. It is still understandable, considering that there are many people who rarely leave their country.

Operators may have services to enabled roaming when the subscribers are abroad, but it is not easy to communicate with the subscriber as people tend to ignore the services which they do not require normally. Not all the subscribers might be aware that they can enable roaming by calling customer service from hotel, or eager to spend that time / money to do so.

Here comes the innovative solutions like Turkcell Technology's RoamActivate to rescue, which is providing a medium for the operators to reach the roaming disabled outbound subscribers to notify about ways of roaming activation. When the subscriber turns on his mobile, he gets an SMS telling about his situation and offering ways to enable roaming. In addition, RoamActivate can enable the subscriber to reach the operator call center to notify about their willingness for roaming activation. It might be mandatory by regulation to record the subscriber's order to enable roaming, preventing automatically activating roaming for the subscriber.

This unique service may look useless to some, as it is already possible to activate roaming by calls from hotel. Unfortunately, being notified of such a service and being offered to reach to the customer care free of charge from his "roaming disabled" line is making such a huge difference; so that this product is proven to be so effective in increasing the number of subscribers.

It's no surprise that tougher times lead to innovative solutions.