Location-based services sans GPS

Location-based services can enable location awareness and related applications on feature phones that lack GPS support offering reasonably good precision. By Subhankar Kundu

Imagine that you land up in Bangalore for the first time and want to find an authentic Bengali restaurant as, like most bongs, you cannot live without a Bengali meal. You have no clue about how to find one or a taxi service which can take you there. It is difficult in a city like Bangalore where there are innumerable crosses and mains, leave alone the 12th ‘A’ mains and ‘B’ mains. This difficulty is not specific to Bangalore. As in any other city in India, it is difficult to find addresses and streets. That is why location finder applications are catching on fast in India. The conventional alternative in such scenarios has been to offer location-based services (LBS) piggybacking on GPS.

However, GPS isn’t essential for LBS, nor is a smartphone. There are applications that let you take advantage of this technology without having to worry about GPS draining your cellphone’s battery or even being supported by your device.

LBS sans GPS

Bangalore-based Imere Technologies is a maker of SDKs for others to build mobile applications. It has developed a prototype of what’s possible with its technology—a social application named Ohe! that knows where in the world you are and enables you to find, connect and share with the rest of the world. It works with any Symbian S60 phone as well as many Java phones provided that you have a mobile data connection (GPRS/3G).

Unlike GPS-enabled location finder applications, Ohe! tracks the exact location of a cellular user through cell triangulation, Wi-Fi access with GPS as an optional accuracy strengthening technique. However, there is no need for a GPS feature on the mobile phone.

This is an ULaP (unified location awareness platform), a patent pending technology that has been developed by Imere. It offers a geographic location service by collecting the wireless information that surrounds a user.

The company claims that it uses wireless information including cell towers’ signals, Wi-Fi signals etc. to improve accuracy levels in finding a user’s location. “Ohe! is powered by our ULaP which is a software technology platform that brings location-awareness to applications,” said Anil Mathews, Founder & CEO, Imere Technologies Private Limited.

If you have Ohe! on your mobile phone or Internet-enabled computer and are at, say, M.G. Road in Bangalore, the application will help you find nearby pubs, restaurants, ATMs or even friends who are online in the same area and using the same application. While the company offers a free location-based service with Ohe!, its business objective is to help other application developers plan, implement, test and deploy location-based services using its underlying SDK. Though developers can access the platform for free, Imere charges a marginal licensing fee from developers for newly developed applications based on the number of application downloads.

Location for mobile and Internet applications is becoming crucial and the success of many applications may depend on how well they adopt location sensing. Imere ULaP, as a platform, collects wireless information surrounding the user and turns it into a geographic location and the accuracy levels are said to be higher than with alternatives that rely solely on cell tower signals to zero in on a user’s location.

Mathews added, “The technology has vast possibilities. In India alone there are nearly 125 million Internet ready phones with a small percentage having inbuilt GPS. Imere’s technology can location-enable almost all feature phones with GPRS capability. This could lead to various advantages like loyalty when you enter a shop, check-in as soon as you reach the airport, pay tolls, low-cost fleet tracking, sales-force tracking, etc.”

However, while there is a potentially huge base of mobile Internet users, actual usage is much lower with an IMRB-IAMAI study suggesting that less than one in ten of the mobile phones that were Net capable were used at all and that only about two million of these are active users. This is a lower figure than the eight million plus broadband subscriber base as per TRAI.

Mathews claimed that, on the desktop, Imere’s technology brings street-level location, something which wasn’t possible earlier. Using this, service providers are able to serve hyper-local ads and content. All of these are software-based.

Yogesh Bijlani, Country Head & GM APAC, Telenity said, “Location-based services have been talked about for quite a while and many industry giants have forayed into this field in the past few years. However, the services that are provided, as of now, cater to the upper end of the pyramid that consists of advanced users of VAS. High-end location technology available on smartphones with data plans reaches out to niche subscribers who are actively using the mobile Internet. Learning from the high penetration of services like infotainment alerts on SMS, if a host of utility applications from a location perspective can be enabled on any GSM mobile by dialing a universal number, then we will have the next mass market application for Indian subscribers.”

Airtel recently launched Airtel Buddy Finder Service, a handset agnostic LBS offering. The People Finder Service of Telenity which is currently being deployed at other operators as well is claimed to be the next killer application.

A close look at the last decade reveals that the killer applications that have shaped the growth of VAS in India have been those that revolved around entertainment and information. The market continues to be dominated by entertainment services—Ringback Tones with over 20% penetration and SMS subscription services with over 10% penetration respectively being the large revenue generators for operators. The success of these applications clearly reveals that the Indian subscriber is looking for basic needs of entertainment, information and utility when it comes to VAS. Services like these also highlight the fact the simplicity of use is also a critical element that has enabled the mass adoption of these applications. Dialing a universal number from any mobile, to subscribe to a service, makes it that much easier for the user to adopt a particular service and makes it successful in the long run.

Bijlani continued, “For a flat fee of Rs. 30 a month, by dialing a universal number ( e.g. *321*88#) a mother can get to know the location of her teenagers who are partying late at night, or a wife can start preparing dinner because she has checked that her spouse has just left his office, or a manager knows the location of all of his team members that are out on a sales call and many more such applications with unlimited usage.”

The underlying technology for the Imere application is that it garners a combination of wireless signals present around a user and covert the same to latitude and longitude and uses a complex set of proprietary algorithms to determine a user’s location based on Cell ID, Wi-Fi and GPS (when available on clients).

Imere has worked closely with Samsung India to launch a location-based application in the vendor’s app store. It is currently staging a pilot with another OEM which is still at a confidential stage. Rediff is one of its largest customers.

Mathews said, “We have independent developers using it for various location-based offerings that they are developing. These include taxi tracking applications, loyalty applications, social networking applications, etc.”

In Airtel Friend Finder, the underlying technology works on four bearers namely SMS, USSD, IVR and WAP. However, USSD is the most popular bearer as it’s simple and easy to use. One needs to dial *321*88# from any mobile handset and the user is on the service. USSD as a technology has been prevalent in India for the longest time but people were using it solely for simple apps like customer self care. Telenity has made USSD compatible with location.

Mathews claimed, “Our technology is independent of GPS and therefore we do not require any extra hardware or special chip. A small software application residing on the phone or desktop is enough. This means that developers and service providers can use the existing infrastructure to provide their services and, at the same time, use the power of location. We have the largest data-set of wireless information in the APAC region. This, in combination with our proprietary algorithms, provides a location platform that is incomparable in the market. Large portals such as Rediff, several telcos and OEMs are using this technology to serve millions of users.”

TeleAtlas is another player in the same domain. While it is not engaged in the business of providing location-based technologies, it does provide digital navigable maps with these technologies being used to deliver additional value.

Rajive Chandra, Director of Sales And Marketing, APAC, TeleAtlas, said, “These location technologies are based on the mobile network which the operator can determine from the cell tower location and by triangulation. The accuracy of this technology is 150-300 meters as compared to GPS which is 10 meters but it is good enough for applications like Friend Finder, Child Tracking, location-based advertisements etc.”

Chandra added that this technology was particularly relevant in the context of E911 services which were mandated in US by the telecom regulator. A scenario of E911 (emergency services) is that when a person meets with an accident, he calls his operator on a predefined number and the operator directs his call to the nearest hospital, based on the location of the subscriber.

As a map provider, TeleAtlas is playing a crucial role in developing this ecosystem by modifying map specifications which best fit this scenario. For example, landmark-based routing is more relevant rather than turn-by-turn navigation.

If trends in the US and Western Europe, markets that have a high penetration of smartphones, are looked at—there is a greater adoption of LBS that leverage GPS and are enabled by downloading applications on the device. Looking closer home in countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand it is services that are provided by leveraging the LBS adopted by operators and applications that are enabled on bearers such as SMS and USSD that can be accessed by all subscribers that have enjoyed wider adoption. Globally, the highest penetration amongst the various location-based services is of community services like Friend Finder, Buddy Finder etc. followed by mobile marketing that enables subscribers to get information regarding the deals and discounts of their chosen interest based upon their location.

Bijlani said, “We have enabled a $10 phone to search location and that’s the beauty of the product.”

In India, companies like Google have taken the lead and have come out with services like Latitude which caters to a niche segment of mobile users who have a high end mobile handset and a data plan.

Lalit Katragadda, Senior Engineer, Google India, commented, “This technology is quite useful to determine the general location of the phone and it makes using maps a lot easier. However, this is much less accurate than GPS devices. In the long run, this is unlikely to substitute for GPS-enabled devices. Note that most modern GPS-enabled devices today not only have GPS on board, they also have six-degree accelerometers that tell the phone not only where it is but also the direction in which it is going and pointing. This enables a far more kinetic experience like turn-by-turn voice directions, augmented reality experiences like Goggles and other geo-social interfaces to be brought alive.”

The challenges

The biggest challenge currently is lack of awareness regarding the availability of these services and the marketing push that is needed to enable customers to know that a wide variety of these services are available. In today’s scenario where every operator has hundreds of value added services available, there is limited bandwidth to educate the market about new innovative services even though subscribers could well end up being delighted by the utility offering.

Bijlani said, “As technology providers, we come out with innovative products and concepts. However, the final onus is on the operator to market the new location-based services so that the message reaches out to the end subscriber. If the service is marketed in an apt and targeted manner, people will adopt it and when the innovation comes down to the lowest end of the pyramid, the usage potential is huge.”

The technology is actually impossible to be implemented unless one has access to information like the coordinates/location of the cell tower (base station) that a phone is connected to. One would also need to know the direction of the cell tower's antenna and its sector width, signal strength, timing data etc.

It is difficult to get the cell tower info from each and every network operator. The connected cell tower IDs and signal strength at various places in the world can be collected by recording the information at all significant locations. Supplemental information can be acquired by recording detected public WLANs and their signal strengths.

In a country like ours where most cannot afford GPS-enabled smartphones, location-based technology that works in other ways is a welcome sign. Moreover, even on a GPS-enabled phone, it is one of the biggest battery hogs so such technology could well prove useful even for smartphone users. However, not everyone agrees. “It’s not enough to indicate to the user where they are approximately, it’s just as important for this to be accurate more often than not and also to indicate the margin of error of the estimated position (the light blue circle that we draw around the estimated position),” concluded Katragadda.

In the end, it is perhaps about what works best for whom. A person carrying a feature phone and there are a hundred times as many of those as there are smartphone users, would definitely appreciate having location-based services on a plain old Java phone.

subhankar.kundu@expressindia.com