For starters, I see LBS as LES – Location Enabled Service. One does not build a product or service around location; one enables a service with location. What this means is that bringing ‘location’ into an application/service can significantly enhance the value of the application or service. Hence location is a ‘killer enabler’ as opposed to being the ‘killer application’.

This directly leads to the bottlenecks – the plethora of technologies and/or products that have to come together to make a successful service. On last count, I can remember there were anywhere from 10 – 16 different companies whose products/services had to be integrated to offer a location based service. Some players that come together while building the ecosystem are the location technology providers, mapping content vendor, billing, privacy rights, authentication, mobile gateway vendors, application developers etc. Trying to get 10-16 companies to work together on a project towards a common purpose is always an arduous task.

SiRF, recognising this bottleneck, has partnered with industry leaders and is driving the creation of an LBS ecosystem. Termed SiRFStudio, it is a middleware platform which allows interconnects into various content and service providers on the infrastructure (server) side and application developers on the handset (client) side. In the past eight months, we have added 80 companies into our ecosystem with about 100+ applications.

All new technologies, that touch us personally, go through this phase of concern before mass adoption. Let’s take credit cards as an example – there were concerns of privacy and security in that too. One could know where you shopped, what you shopped, how much you paid, when you paid. However, the concerns outweigh the convenience and other benefits of having a card. These advantages, along with good checks and balances and a system that identifies and stops offenders, have expanded the usage of credit cards.

Location based services touch our lives personally. Be it using them for our own safety-security, for knowing the whereabouts of your loved ones, for turn-by-turn navigation or just social networking with your peers - location is a key enabler and ingredient for all these services. If the technology for location determination and dissemination resides within the device owned by the users, it gives the users the ability to control access to their location.