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.

Getting more out of data roaming traffic

To stimulate usage while abroad, operators are offering aggressive roaming retail tariffs to their subscribers which are supported by negotiated IOT from partners. Because of flat rate retail tariff for a country and little margins, it is more important than ever to keep the steering effective to keep the costs under control.

Especially for data which has relatively higher IOT, the difference between the negotiated and regular IOT could be so high that even a small percentage of traffic loss to an unpreferred partner may mess all the business of your “ aggressive retail campaign”.

To achieve this, operators are working hard to tune their steering systems or support network based steering systems with SIM-based steering systems. As the loss of traffic to unpreferred partner is more serious for data traffic because of high difference of IOT for data, we need more than tuning the existing steering solutions.

Steering systems should be aware of data-heavy or data-only terminals and handle them with different settings, different preferred operator or in a more aggressive way. While the data-only terminals can be detected easily (no UpdateLocation but only GPRS UpdateLocation messages) by network-based steering systems, it is not possible for them to detect smart phones as not all the partners can send the IMEI information in the registration messages. This leads to using operator databases for subscriber - terminal type mapping which can let you know who is using a smartphone.

The definition for smartphone can be slightly different for everyone. From the data traffic perspective, we're more likely to be interested in the recent generation of smartphones with big screens and easy to use interfaces boosting data usage.

The ability to know which outbound roamer is using a smartphone may not be enough alone itself, as not all smartphone users are data-hungry subscribers. Checking their local and roaming usage history could be priceless to detect data-heavy roamers which we want to steer to our partners with negotiated data IOT.

Informa predicts that revenues from mobile data roaming will increase by a massive 246% between 2010 and 2015. With the growing trend of regulating roaming business more strictly, operators are working on data roaming business more to be able to compensate the losses.