European revenues from mobile location-based services (LBS) will more than double in 2005, according to telecommunications industry research firm Berg Insight. The firm projects that LBS will grow 153 percent this year, to 274 million Euros, with annual growth rates of 84 percent over the next five years.

“This year we have begun to see the expected shift in revenues from voice to non-voice services in the mobile industry,” says senior analyst Johan Fagerberg. “Increasingly user friendly handsets paired with a more mature approach to content services create the right conditions for launching new offerings on the market.”

Navigation is just one example of “an attractive new mobile service that takes advantage of positioning technology,” says Fagerberg. Operators such as Vodafone and TeliaSonera have recently introduced products which turn mobile phones into GPS navigators, he noted, and “unlike other GPS navigation products, they feature dynamic map information that is downloaded directly from the wireless network. That enables users to view anything from the latest traffic updates to hotels and restaurants on the handset display.”

The corporate market is also very important for LBS, Fagerberg adds, insofar as a growing number of European businesses use asset, fleet and workforce management solutions in their daily operations. “By tracking the position of employees, vehicles or other movable assets using mobile phones, managers can improve efficiency as well as maintain a higher level of security,” he explains. “There have already been several cases where tracking of mobile phones have lead to the recovery of valuable cargo from stolen vehicles.”

Additional details are available in Berg's just-released report, “The Structure of the European LBS Market 2005.

 
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