Total mobile LBS revenues to reach $12.7B by 2014

While technical advances in handset screens, user interfaces, processors, memory and graphics-handling technologies previously contributed to the launch of high-cost mobile devices, their features – including GPS – are now migrating to mass-market devices. GPS unit prices and form factors have improved considerably, making integrated GPS much more cost-effective and design-friendly.Due to the growth of mobile Internet usage and the surge in GPS-enabled devices, Juniper Research predicts that location-based local search and information services will be used by nearly 1.5 billion mobile users by 2014.

“I suppose the key observation is simply that, after a number of false dawns, mobile location-based services are coming into their own,” said Dr. Windsor Holden, principal analyst at Juniper, Hampshire, England. “The confluence of the Apple iPhone 3G and App Store fundamentally changed the way that developers and users viewed applications for the mobile phone. “Indeed, location enablement is rapidly becoming a de facto feature of many mobile applications,” he said. “However, whilst it is easy to point to these events as being ‘defining’ in the development of commercial mobile LBS, in reality a far larger number of things came together at the same time: advances in network infrastructure and on-device positioning technology, improvements in digital mapping content and improvements in user experience. “The combination of these factors has been crucial to the recent upsurge both in the number of mobile LBS products on services that are available, and in their adoption by end users.”

The Juniper study found that growth in mobile Internet adoption is expected to provide further impetus to the adoption of browser-based local search services. The sharing culture of Web 2.0 is increasingly shaping the way many location-based services and location-enabled applications develop.