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As cellphones with GPS chips - Apple's iPhone, for example - come on the market, the creation of location-based services becomes a realistic prospect.
A local company that provides an audio guide for tourists using a purpose-built GPS receiver is already eyeing the potential of the iPhone and other GPS-capable phones.
It's a breakthrough that's been a long time coming. Pundits have been talking excitedly for half a decade about the brave new world of location-based services. But researchers say New Zealand is well behind the leaders - namely Japan, Europe and the United States.
What are location-based services, or LBS, and why are they worth getting excited about? According to Krassie Petrova, a lecturer and researcher in Auckland University of Technology's school of computing and mathematical sciences, they are applications that provide a mobile user with information related to and dependent on his or her specific location.
An often-cited example is a service that alerts a visitor in an unfamiliar city to nearby restaurants or petrol stations. In theory, you don't need a GPS-capable phone to make that kind of service work. But in this country at least, they haven't taken off.
Petrova points to a number of reasons why. Most significant is that New Zealand's mobile network operators, Telecom and Vodafone, can't pinpoint a mobile user's location accurately enough.
In the US and Europe, government regulation forced operators to invest in technology allowing them to get a reasonably accurate positional fix to enable emergency services to respond to calls.
"What happened in the United States and Europe is that after the regulations were passed, mobile operators were given funding incentives to offset the cost of setting up the additional infrastructure," Petrova says.
"New Zealand mobile operators don't have any incentive, or regulation to comply with, to spend the money."
With US and European operators now able to locate mobile users to within about a 50m radius, Petrova says LBS providers can begin to develop realistic business models. "That's the next step."
Infrastructure isn't the only requirement, though. Security and privacy are also concerns, highlighted in a masters thesis by University of Auckland marketing student Clara Leung.
Leung looked at the potential of LBS in the tourism industry, conducting focus groups with about 30 travellers staying in Auckland backpacker hostels.
While no one has much appetite for being bombarded with mobile marketing messages while walking down Queen St, Leung's travellers were less concerned about privacy if they had control over who could access their location information.
Her research brought to light several other points LBS providers might want to bear in mind. Users aren't prepared to pay much for new services, although they could be prepared to pay a premium for applications that enhance their safety or help them out of a tight spot.
Nor can users be bothered with services that are hard to use; ideally those provided here and overseas will be the same. They don't want a special device for LBS and services must satisfy a real need.
Margo Buchanan-Oliver, associate professor of marketing at the University of Auckland, thinks tourism applications are an obvious market for LBS.
"This gives an added value, a different kind of perspective on the tourist experience," she says.
It could also have a national marking spinoff. "It shows the country as technologically literate." But we're not there yet. You don't have to go far off the beaten track in New Zealand to be out of range of the 3G cellular signal that LBS need. That's where the GPS-equipped iPhone and its ilk come in.
Jonathan Kruse, whose Auckland company provides a GPS-based audio tour guide service, has been talking to Vodafone about making it available on mobile phones.
Called Kruse, the service consists of a GPS receiver with built-in memory that uses the co-ordinates of more than 2000 places of interest to trigger a commentary that plays over the user's car radio.
Kruse would gladly dispense with the hardware side of the service and make it available as a software download through Apple's iPhone App Store.
"That's ultimately where we see the business going, where we're an online content provider."
AUT's Petrova agrees tourism has LBS potential. But watching mobile phone users on the street in her native Bulgaria, she thinks she's seen a clue to what could be a killer LBS application.
"They don't greet each other with `Hi', but with `Where are you?'. They immediately want to know the location of the other person. So that could actually be a useful service."
* Anthony Doesburg is an Auckland technology journalist.
