I missed seeing an item in the New York Times technology blog, Bits, that Saul Hansell wrote. On October 10, he noted a report had come out from Telephia that said that "location-based services" accounted for half of all the money spent on cellphone applications.*

Half!

Hansell's irritation centered around the fact that all this money is being spent on services like Verizon's VZ Navigator, which "display maps and driving directions using GPS hardware built into phones. Verizon charges $9.99 a month or $2.99 a day for the service."

"I already own" the phone and the GPS in it, Hansell points out, yet he and any Verizon customer still has to pay extra to use it.

Of course that rubs him the wrong way. And of course it's great that a device like the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet takes the opposite approach.

But the subtext of Telephia's report seems to me to be that people really like and use location-based services. That's why half the money being spent on apps went for them. That seems to me to be a pretty big arrow pointing in the direction Nokia (or any company in the walkaround web arena) would want to be headed.

It's nice to have some facts to flesh out the intuitions now and then.
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* in the U.S. in the second quarter of this year

Originally Posted by YoDude

What hasn't come to fruition yet were the predictions that marketing apps would use LBS to steer users toward purchases via text messages... based on the users proximity to the target or information searches from the device.

Originally Posted by YoDude

What hasn't come to fruition yet were the predictions that marketing apps would use LBS to steer users toward purchases via text messages... based on the users proximity to the target or information searches from the device.