[Satellite Today – 4-3-08] Location-based services (LBS) worldwide revenues will reach $13.3 billion by 2013, with the personal navigation and enterprise services categories generating the highest revenues, according to a report released April 3 by ABI Research.
    The report estimates that friend-finders, local information searches, family tracker applications and enterprise applications, including workforce tracking and fleet management, will join personal navigation as popular consumer applications of LBS.
    “Personal navigation and enterprise services are projected to be the highest revenue-generating services of the five LBS categories profiled and are forecast to be worth about $4.3 billion and $6.5 billion respectively, per annum, by 2013,” ABI research industry analyst Jamie Moss said in a statement. “The interesting thing about the LBS content-producing sector is that much of the information is already available. It’s a win-win situation for content providers: They already have established markets for their map and POI data (automotive and telematics), and LBS is yet another that could potentially provide them with considerable additional licensing revenue.”
    However, the report said there are still important service-related developments needed to ensure LBS’s future success. The wider availability of all-inclusive data tariffs will spur service usage, which will in turn reduce users’ concerns about how much data value-added services like LBS might consume. Perhaps the most important development will be the cross-network interoperability of services. Once services provided by one carrier are capable of incorporating users from other networks, then the usage of LBS will be driven virally by the desire to respond to and interact with friends and family on other networks.