Presented to the Digital Communications Market Group at Intellect UK. See their website for more details: http://www.intellectuk.org/component/option,com_events/task,view_detail/agid,1854/year,2010/month,10/day,28/Itemid,47/

1. Location Based Services:
Innovation and Opportunities
Ben Dowling – Geomium
ben@geomium.com
28th
October 2010

2. Location Based Services

Any Service based on the users location

A broad range of applications

Games

Local search

Communication

Navigation

Social

Commerce

3. LBS Adoption

There has been an explosion in the number of
people using LBS

More and more location based services are
being offered

FourSquare

Gowalla

Google maps / latitude

Yelp

Geomium

4. Why now?

Smartphones

Location aware

Mobile Internet

High speed

Fixed price

Availability

App stores

Discovery

Installation

5. How are people using it?

Find good restaurants

See where your friends are

Find events

Get discounts

Dating

Entertainment – simply pass the time

6. Who is using LBS?

19- to 35-year-old, college-educated males who
are influential among their friends and family –
Forrester

Early adopters

Tech savvy

7. State of Play

Foursquare is the current market leader

4 million users

Popularised “check ins”

Model copied by many competitors

Game mechanics

Rewards the users with “badges”

Check in the most to become “Mayor”

Rewards for “Mayors”

8. State of Play

Many new apps entering the field

Hotlist

Scvngr

Geomium

Many existing apps adding LBS features

Qype and Yelp have added Checkins

Google latitude

Twitter

Facebook places

9. Growing Market

The majority of people still don't have a
smartphone

This number will continue to rise as price falls and
people upgrade at the end of their contract

Many users with a smartphone don't install
apps

App stores keep getting simpler

Some people don't use LBS apps

10. Smartphone shipments

11. The Opportunity

Mobile location-based services will generate
annual global revenues of $13.3 billion by 2013,
up from $515 million in 2007 - ABI Research

Targeted marketing

Mobile commerce

Users engaged on a device they carry
everywhere

Drive people to physical locations

12. Barriers to Adoption

Privacy concerns

“Too complicated” or time consuming

Have to manually “check in” at every location

Lack of awareness

Lack of benefit

Why bother?

13. Privacy concerns

Privacy is often cited as a big barrier to LBS

52% said they were "very or extremely
concerned" about loss of privacy from using
location-sharing applications - Webroot

Geomium offers a private “friends only” option,
and gets the user to choose during signup

Many LBS platforms offer no privacy options
and are seeing strong user growth

14. User engagement

A meaningful experience for the user

Keep the user coming back

Build a community

Provide value

Local deals

Social interactions

Discovery

15. The Future of LBS?

Realtime

Push-based

As a communication aid

Mobile commerce

Targeted advertising

Geofencing – automatic checkins

Integrated into more existing applications

16. What are we doing?

Combining different types of local data into a
single platform

People

Places

Events

Deals

Creating a social community

Targeting 19-25 year olds (students, young
professionals)

17. Where are we?

Launched in September

Currently iPhone and web

Realtime location

Great response from users – promising growth

Great response from businesses

Places and Deals

Push-notifications coming soon

Android and Blackberry coming soon

18. Thank you!
ben@geomium.com