On the Spot

SERVICES Cellphone networks can serve as location-spotting systems, and here’s a service available to all.

Priyanka Joshi
June 30, 2006

Pooja Narayan, a working single mother, worries about her teenage daughters if she can't reach them on the cellphone. “My eldest won't answer because she plays basketball, and has to leave the phone in her duffle bag,” rues she.

But she can look forward to Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited's (BSNL's) People Locator Service, a wireless location–based service soon to be launched. To locate her daughters, she'd just have to refer to her cellphone or the Internet–which would allow her to zero in on the spot marked on an interactive map, in real time.

People Locator would help the actual phone user too. Simple software would use the location to offer SMS directions to nearby petrol stations, ATM machines, hospitals and like – even alerts on friends who're in the vicinity.

There's nothing new to the technology. It's just that privacy concerns and unfriendly user interfaces kept such services from succeeding so far.

This time should be different, feels Dilip Singh, CEO, Telenity, a firm that supplies backend technology for such services to network operators. “The market for location based services is an exciting one,” he says, “If the applications are done and marketed well, I think this will be very successful technology for India's 50 million strong mobile population.” He bases his argument on the need for convenience: “Imagine being able to get the complete route directions to all the latest restaurants, hotels or tourist spots, within a 10 square kilometer vicinity.”

Globally it's a market forecast at $8,5 billion in revenues for operators by 2010, according to Telenity, which expects India alone to become a market worth Rs3,000 crore(!) by then. “There would be services like chat, or find-a-buddy, which could be free (apart from SMS charge), while services to track assets like cars/fleets and managing employees can be priced at Rs30-50 per month by operators,” offers a visibly excited Ashwani Vachher, Vice President, Sales, Telenity.

In the meantime, other services are rushing to meet some of those needs. This January, Google unveiled a search page designed specially for net-enabled mobile devices to search for locational information. But this is a service that the phone user reaches out for–with-out the eerie feeling of being followed around town as a spot on someone's radar.