Location Labs is the company behind the Safely suite of services.  One of the most important is Safely Locate which includes AT&T FamilyMap, Sprint Family Locator, and T-Mobile FamilyWhere… services that we build and market in partnership with some of the biggest brands in the US.  Because these are paid services which enable Mom and Dad to locate their kids via mobile phones, we expect to get questions about the impact of free services (like Google Latitude and Apple Find My Friends) on Safely Locate.

When Google Latitude launched in February 2009, we were optimistic.  Our biggest challenge was never taking customers from competing services – it has always been educating Moms and Dads about what a “family locator” service is, and convincing them that they need it.  Once they understand it, they love it, but explaining the value in one simple sentence is more difficult than you might imagine.  So, if Google is going to do the hard work for us – educating our target customers, parents, to see the value in locating their kids – it gives us a much easier way to explain Safely Locate: “It’s like Google Latitude, only better in these ways…”.

The Google Latitude launch played out even better than we anticipated.  32 months later, Safely Locate services have increased total paying subscribers by over 682%.

Now, Apple has joined the club with Find My Friends.

Latitude and Find My Friends are like Facebook.  These are free, permission-based services targeted towards friends, not family members.  Services like Loopt, which have never been competitive with Safely Locate, are far more similar to Latitude and Find My Friends.  A service built around “friend locating” puts control in the hands of the individual and targets a completely different demographic than one built around “family locating” which gives control to an authority like a parent.

Family locator services (Safely Locate) are more like ADT Home Security.  They are safety-oriented and meant to act as extensions to core services like 911.  Safely Locate targets parents who pay the mobile phone bill for their kids, who are required to comply with parents.  You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone willing to install a free home security system.  For the same reasons, parents have a willingness to pay for premium mobile personal security services like Safely Locate.

When Find My Friends gains adoption like Latitude, many of these users will realize the value in personal security “locator” services… and they may want to do more than just locating “on-demand”.

Safely Locate supports unique features that are geared towards the needs of families… not of friends trying to find each other at bars.  For example, parents can set automated location checks at preset times of day and receive notifications via SMS and e-mail to allow for passive use of the service.

With Safely Locate, you can locate any phone, both smartphones and non-smartphones… and it does not require downloading an application.  Also, and perhaps most importantly for some parents, because Location Labs has partners like AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile, we can see the billing relationships between Mom and Dad and their kids, so kids don’t need to opt-in to share location with their parents.  Mom can just locate.

These and other powerful features are what distinguish our premium family-oriented service from free friend-oriented services.  This is what has drawn many parents (who located their kids’ phones over 400MM times last year!) to Safely Locate.

As with Google Latitude, we expect Apple’s Find My Friends feature to increase the awareness of “locator” services which ultimately benefits Safely Locate.

-Tasso

After remaining largely quiet, the U.S. Congress has proposed a number of laws addressing Internet privacy and in particular the use of subscriber location.  What happened?  Why now?  Is this merely reactive grandstanding, or is something interesting happening here?  Let’s take a look.

First, congressional attention if nothing else provides some indication of location services reaching critical mass.  Mobile platform providers have clearly caught on, and are competing feverishly to figure out how best to utilize this capability, share it with developers and advertisers, and at the same time be cognizant of the potential privacy concerns.

Location determination in a mobile environment is a combination of GPS and cell/WiFi triangulation.  One important battleground for the various platforms is in acquiring a superior cell and WiFi access point database in order to best enable cell/WiFi triangulation.  Primarily this is done through “crowd-sourcing”.  That is, the device monitors visible cell sites and WiFi access points, and whenever a GPS fix is done on the device, the mapping between the GPS fix and the visible cells and access points (along with signal strength) is uploaded to the network, over time building out a comprehensive database that can be used when GPS is not desired or available.  This practice in fact is part of what got Apple and Google in trouble earlier this year.  In part, proper notice was not given to users that this kind of collection was taking place, and further Apple made a few foolish mistakes, such as not encrypting the data, and storing it indefinitely.

Acquiring crowd-sourced data in this fashion for the purpose of providing a better location determination technology for developers is actually a fairly tame act.  Assuming proper notice is provided, assuring that collected data is anonymous, and that industry-standard steps are taken to safeguard the data, such a practice may have (and probably should have) gone along with little or no notice.

Unfortunately, platform providers are competing on much more than merely providing the best location technology.  They must also compete in providing advertisers with the best display and click-through rates.  Achieving this is, in part, a problem of deducing user “context”.  That is, what do I know about this user, and what this user is currently doing with their device that I can use to place a better performing ad?  Of course the user’s current location (and possibly their location history) can play an important role in this process.

For example, as Apple was rolling out their iAd platform, changes made to their privacy policy made it clear that they had plans of incorporating location for this purpose.

A second area of interest for lawmakers is at least more directly nefarious.  As location services gain adoption, there is a risk that users may become complacent, and potentially have little awareness of what applications and services have access to their location data.  This risk may be exploited by malicious actors wishing to unknowingly monitor the location of other individuals.  This is not an unreasonable fear, and it is the platform providers responsibility (among others across the value chain) to take steps to mitigate this risk.  Proper notice and consent are clearly part of the answer.  Beyond this, Apple and Google have looked at creative ways to provide visual cues that location is being accessed and to provide system tools for managing applications with location access.  Do these measures go far enough?  Does the government have some responsibility here for setting guidelines?

These two major concerns are clearly the motivation behind the current bill in the Senate, introduced by Al Franken and Richard Blumenthal, The Location Privacy and Protection Act of 2011 (S. 1223).  This bill takes reasonable, fairly narrow steps in providing a baseline for proper notice and consent as it relates to location in a consumer service setting.  The framing is done from the perspective of closing existing loopholes as they pertain to outdated statutes, such as ECPA, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a law that is now 25 years old.

In a second piece I will take a loop at the House bill, the so-called “GPS Act” and how it extends these concerns to include the use of location in law enforcement.

@sahotes

And in reading the Fast Company article it was interesting to see that AT&T’s CTO, John Donovan, uses FamilyMap to check up on his son even though he’s in college. As Fast Company says, ‘now, if Rory is out late at a party, Donovan can call him up. “I say, ‘What are you doing?’ He usually says he’s going home,” Donovan says, chuckling.’

If you want to read the story on our website go to:

http://www.locationlabs.com/news/coverage/meet-the-app-man-at-att/

And if you want to read the original article in Fast Company go to:

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/156/meet-the-app-man-at-att

Safely,

Mark

Twitter: @MarkAndersen

With our evolving Sparkle technology, embodied in part by our recent release of our Spatial Storage and Geofencing solution for smartphones, as well as the work we are doing with network operators we are working to help enable this sea change.

So what’s new?

Well, for one thing working with our developer partners we’ve learned a lot about what the needs are around spatial storage. As a stand-alone capability, extending spatial primitives to the already mature cloud storage market, it’s clear that this is not a screaming need. Even for moderate to large applications (requiring, say, a single spatial index of say 1 bn records), COTS solutions both cloud based and otherwise are available and adequate. The trick of course is how this data is associated with other data types (often referred to as “context”) and in turn how it is queried. For example, consider check-in data. Context might include the social graph (i.e. check-ins associated with friends or friends-of-friends, etc.), temporally (associated with a particular event), or by keyword (say check-ins with a comment including the word “revolution”.) This makes the problem much more interesting, and is something we’re working on.

Our first vertical integration in this area is around geofencing. A common problem brought to us is this: notify me when the user is near X where X ∈ S, and S is some dynamic set of location-tagged records, such as venues or check-ins. OK, that’s more interesting. Making this work requires some heavy lifting for the developer, including: running code on the handset 24/7, efficient use of evolving location technologies in a way that minimizes power consumption, synchronization with the network relating to changes or updates in the set of location-tagged records, etc. In a nutshell, this is the driving capability behind our recent product announcement.

To better understand this concept, consider the following possible applications: a) Notify me when one of my subscribers is close to a tornado or other weather event, b) Notify me when one of my subscribers is near some expiring asset, like a parking space or discount movie ticket, c) Notify me when I’m near one of my friends who just checked into foursquare, etc.

Of course to make this happen there were a number of dependent technologies and capabilities that came along with it. For one, we had to provide hosted spatial storage and a set of API’s for accessing it. Click here for more information on how to get started with Spatial Storage. For now it is a straight extension of cloud storage including efficient range search (in 2D) against a particular layer, but as hinted to above, there is more to come.

The geofencing solution is provided by a mobile library (available for iPhone and Android) that is linked into your application. You register a geofence instance and refer to a particular spatial layer managed in the Spatial Storage solution. The library runs in the background, and if/when your user comes in proximity of an element in the layer you are notified via callback. This capability, unique to the industry, is proving to be fundamental to a wide range of exciting new services.

For more info on how to get started, you can visit our developer portal.

@sahotes

Enter the No Download Zone!

A pre-install means that users don’t have to download anything to their phone – effectively solving one of the toughest problems faced by smart phone developers: ubiquity in service availability without worrying about users deleting their app. Sparkle exposes device access and control capabilities to the network via a REST-based API. In this initial release, we focus on location, exposed both as a real-time location API (initiated via MT-SMS or IP-based push) and a location streaming (or push) API, updating the network application if and when the user’s location changes. We have also addressed the two typical concerns of location access – privacy and battery life. Our patent-pending technology minimizes battery impact while providing a high quality of service location data stream suitable for a wide variety of applications and services.

More Devices Coming …

The Echo is an Android 2.2 device, and through the rest of the year we will continue to be pre-installed on all Sprint smartphones across multiple platforms. So, look out for more announcements from us in upcoming days and months.

For more information about the Kyocera Echo launch, click here.

@sahotes

I wanted to write this post both to boast a little about the technology behind DriveSmart Plus and also address some questions or misconceptions that have popped up in the past week and a half…

Technology

Location Labs has been creating innovative mobile family safety solutions for most of the past decade and currently operates what we believe to be the largest (and best!) family location platform on the planet, a platform that powers AT&T’s FamilyMap, Sprint Family Locator, and T-Mobile’s FamilyWhere. Years ago, we started working on a solution to address what we saw was an increasing societal problem: distracted driving. But years ago, the technology just wasn’t there. We weren’t able to deliver a solution that we were proud of, and so the project remained in our R&D group and we watched sadly as the statistics became more grim and celebrities threw their clout behind raising public awareness as a means to address the problem.

But the technology caught up: our engineering team had some incredible breakthroughs and the capabilities of phones continued to improve. Today, the simplicity of DriveSmart Plus belies the incredible technology under the covers: DriveSmart Plus uses patent-pending technology to detect driving while having minimal impact on battery life of the phone. This is a tremendous breakthrough: a “dumb” solution that left the GPS chip on all of the time would reduce battery life so badly that a phone battery would not survive through lunch. With DriveSmart Plus, many people hardly notice the battery impact at all—an astounding accomplishment our engineering team worked day and night to achieve in order to meet T-Mobile’s exacting standards.

User Experience

While we’re very proud of DriveSmart Plus, for all of the magic under the covers, there is still some magic that we have yet to achieve. There is no way (yet!) for DriveSmart Plus to know if the phone belongs to the driver, passenger, or someone riding the bus. The phone just detects when it is moving faster than 10 MPH or so. For that reason, the Driving Mode screen has a large one-press “override” button in the bottom left corner (as well as an emergency “911″ button in the bottom right), which disables driving mode and returns the phone to normal functionality. This is almost exactly the “unlock” experience that most phones have, with one exception: with DriveSmart Plus, a parent can choose to be notified whenever a child activates the Override while in Driving Mode.

As you can see from the picture below, DriveSmart Plus also allows the user to “whitelist” up to three applications. This feature acknowledges that there may be some features that a user may want to use, safely, while driving: turn-by-turn navigation, for example, or a music player.

Of course, no software solution is a substitute for good judgment: you should never drive while distracted and must always obey the law. Our hope, though, is that this service will help reduce the temptation to respond to that text message and make the road a safer place for all of us.

Safe Driving,

Joel

Twitter: @kivieg

There are companies that have been doing LBS for 20 years and the prior art is staggering.

Yesterday, Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch wrote an article about a recently granted patent on location-based services and Geofencing. Since Location Labs has commercial services that make it easy for developers to add geofencing functionality to their apps, not surprisingly some of our developer partners have asked us “what gives?”. So, I thought it would be sensible for Scott (our CTO) and me to share our perspective.

The reality is that there is so much prior art and patent overlap in the world of LBS that I wouldn’t sweat it. We’re not. Just keep building your incredible apps… Location Labs will help you. We’ve got your back.

A Long History of Location-Based Services – the geo-spatial industry is not a new thing…

15 years ago, my friend Tom Doyle at Qualcomm was Geofencing trucks, and crowdsourcing traffic data using GPS data of installed hardware. In 2002, we showcased peer-to-peer location-based alerting technology where friends were notified when they were near one another. Companies like ours and others like Gravitate were started as Geofencing platforms close to a decade ago. Geofencing wasn’t discovered in 2005, it’s been around for 20+years. Those were the dark ages of location, but a lot of real technology came out of these early commercial efforts.”

Another commercial example – Psynet / Location-based Matching and Geofencing…

“More specifically, in 2005, we went beyond just Geofencing and launched a location-criteria matching alert application with a development partner in Korea called Psynet. Psynet was the eHarmony of Korea. The system implemented location-based profile/analytics with Geofencing – where location data was used to create a collaborative filtered profile and then geofence matched in real time. That means that you got an alert when someone who matched your dating profile was nearby! There were 50,000 users of this service within weeks of their debut.”

Geofencing IP – yeah, we got it…

In case it matters, Location Labs’ core geofence patent (Patent No: 7643834) predates the one mentioned yesterday by three (3) years. The reality is that there is so much prior art and patent overlap in the world of LBS that I wouldn’t sweat it. We’re not. Just keep building your incredible apps… Location Labs will help you. We’ve got your back.

For any question feel free to email us at info@location-labs.com.

Our CTO, Scott Hotes, will comment from a technical perspective in a blog post to follow this one…

@tassor

By Akash Agarwal

Location-based marketing is a much talked about subject among large national retailers, local merchants and digital media agencies. Even Silicon Valley entrepreneurs want to get in on the action, creating innovative applications for mobile check-in and checkout, location-based gaming and buying, and advertising. From simple local advertising and more complex location-detection technology using GPS and triangulation that is available on most smartphones, location-based marketing is using a diverse array of methods to help marketers achieve their goals. Marketers are tapping mobile location-based services (LBS) to compel customers to use various types of applications to engage with the brand, product or venue via their mobile phone to drive new customer acquisition and expand their existing loyalty programs.

Given these two important drivers, most brands and retailers need to consider the three “R s” of a mobile LBS marketing campaign: reach, relevancy and redemption.

Reach

It is imperative that any mobile campaign reaches the entire universe of customers for the brand or retailer in question.

It is simply not enough to target only the “customers using smartphones.” This segment may be very small for the particular brand or retailer.

Today smartphone penetration is, on average, only around 30 percent of the subscriber base. Most consumers are still using feature phones – phones that allow for voice calling and simple text messaging (SMS).

Relevancy

Having a location-based mobile campaign targeted at the right segment of users is likely to yield the best results. The question becomes how do companies find or develop a relevant segment of customers to target?

A direct way is to target customers who have opted-in for promotions and offers.

Another way to capture real-time customer intent is in the context of a mobile search, such as “Mexican Restaurant Denver.” This is similar to search-based advertising online, with a greater chance of a more immediate physical click-through purchase.

You can also infer location when you have location information in your customer database. Mobile phones can also help pinpoint the physical proximity to a venue, product or service.

Redemption

Redemption is also referred to as engagement.

What triggers a customer to engage – is it a coupon or an offer that is presented by some action, such as check-in at a particular venue?

Or is it the act of capturing a picture of the product or venue and certifying, “I am here”?

Mobile location-based physical engagement is now possible in number of ways such as physical proof of presence, act of check-in and then checking-out or being able to act on a flash time-based sale by showing up in-person.

Some of the ways in which such campaigns are being implemented include

• Message-based location alerts
• Smartphone-based Mobile Applications
• Message-based alerts

Such services typically require a pre-emptive opt in by the user in advance of an alert being pushed.

Alerts can take the form of SMS text messages based on a rule – for example, “Send me a coupon for my favorite local restaurants as and when they become available.”

The vast majority of phones support this capability and universal location services can help locate phones across all wireless carriers.

An important factor to consider is the cost for such a broad based campaigns because remotely locating a phone that does not have GPS capabilities incurs a significant cost.

Smartphone applications

Another way to capture the attention of consumers on the go is to develop smartphone applications that extend the brand or retailer’s presence on mobile phones.

These applications can provide a new way to share product details, deliver offers, allow users to confirm their presence at a particular venue (check-in), and leverage social media to share their intent or desired purchase.

Smartphones are equipped with GPS tools to allow location to be captured instantly allowing the application to provide a personalized and customized experience.

IN SUMMARY, in undertaking any LBS campaign, a marketer can maximize its customer base by reaching users of both smartphones and non-smartphones.

A program will be most successful that uses both intelligent applications and broad SMS alerts.

Privacy and transparency of what is being done with the user’s “location” should be disclosed and shared with the user at all times.

Akash Agarwal is senior vice president of products and business development at Location Labs, a location-based platform company in Emeryville, CA. Reach him at akash@location-labs.com

$2BB LBM Market by 2014

So, what is the excitement about? $2BB projected spend in location-based marketing by 2014 from the current $400MM according to BIA/Kelsey, a 57% CAGR. However, the story of how we get there is not all that clear. Besides Groupon (and their recent insane valuation) “no one has figured this out”, as Facebook said at the conference. Specifically in the mobile context, is check-in where it’s at? Is it barcode scanning, or tracking a user’s location with special devices installed in the store like ShopKick does? Or is it geofencing?

Retention vs. Acquisition

Let’s step back and think what matters to brands, retailers and local merchants – it’s customer acquisition and retention. Check-In and scanning provide proof-of-presence, which if done right (walking inside a store for a few Kickbucks doesn’t count!), can be great tools for measuring and increasing loyalty and retention. But, what tools help drive and measure customer acquisition?

Geofencing, a customer acquisition tool

Enter geofencing – aimed dead center at customer acquisition. Let’s say you are Macy’s… wouldn’t you want the person who just pulled up at the mall to know what’s for sale in your store and walk over to Macy’s, not the other stores? Location Labs’ geofencing product enables you to message users who enter the geographical proximity of a store location with an offer custom to that store – and across thousands of such stores. Importantly, the product helps you message customers with shopping intent, and not just someone driving by the store. What if you want to reach customers within a 5-mile radius of your store, and given them a timed offer? We have technology for that. What if you want to know who among these users recently checked-in? We have technology for that. We are seeing several big retailers, brands and local merchant solution providers step up and leverage geofencing to drive store traffic and customer acquisition. And this is how you get to the $2BB figure. You can learn more about geofencing and our other products here:

http://www.location-labs.com/products

In fact, this is the heavy-lifting in location our engineering team is doing (see Scott’s recent blog post): locating using hybrid GPS data, determining shopping intent, addressing the complex problems of spatial storage and triggering, optimally managing device battery life… to mention a few things.

2010 is not yet over (we have more announcements coming). We are amped up about the future the New Year ushers for our technologies, products and customers. Here’s to a happy & prosperous 2011 — stay tuned!

1. Access to Location

For many developers, on the face of it this sounds like a fairly straight-forward question. Namely, if I’m building a mobile app, I simply get location through native API’s on the device. True enough, and if this fits with your application you can safely ignore this question and move on to the next section. However, for many applications that leverage location (or wish to), this is not enough.

For example, you may need to locate your user remotely, independent of a mobile application running on their device (consider: you offer 24 hour roadside assistance through a 1-800 service, wouldn’t it be great to locate the user from the network?) Network access to location requires a close relationship
with the underlying network operator. We are in production with the top four in the US: Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile. We enable developers to access this through the Universal Location Service.

As a second example, users may access your service through a mobile application, but you may need the app to run in the background, 24/7, monitoring location. Sure, you could write this yourself, but there a number of non-trivial aspects to building it that may not be where you want to spend your precious R&D dollars. Getting this right requires a solution that runs in the background 24/7 resilient to network outages, flaky GPS support, various conditions that cause the app to reset, etc. all in a manner that efficiently manages power consumption. Getting this right is no easy task, that’s why even the OS providers themselves (such as Apple iOS and Google Android) don’t even get this right.

2. Geofencing and Other Dynamic Spatial Processing

Geofencing is rapidly becoming an important aspect of location-based marketing strategies. Advertisers are finding high value in messaging customers in response to their current location (as well as recent location history.) Translating location streams (as detailed in the previous section) into these kinds of spatial triggers is an interesting technical challenge.

A general purpose solution to this problem looks very much like a spatial (or spatio-temporal) expert system. That is, you combine a passive location data feed with a set of rules for when triggers should fire. Location Labs approaches this problem by considering the primary use cases first, such as geo-fencing and user proximity. These are far and away the majority of interest in this space. We have also developed a more general purpose solution that provides a type of “plug-in” architecture for adding new and different spatial trigger algorithms that access location data in a well-defined way. More information on Location Labs geofencing can be found here.

3. Spatial Storage and Spatial Indexing

Developers often ask about location storage and how this problem should be approached. Like most interesting engineering questions the answers is: “it depends”. Spatial storage in an RDBMS setting with supporting spatial indexing (including native spatial access methods) is a mature technology, and in most cases commodity solutions suffice. There are a few exceptions worth mentioning…

First, if the data is truly big enough, a commodity RDBMS system (such as PostGIS) may not suffice. If performance requirements dictate that the data needs to be in memory (even with native spatial indexing, such as an R-Tree or Quad-Tree), and you have literally billions of records that live in a single index, and hand sharding (that is, sharding across multiple hosts is not automated) is not an option, then a custom solution may be required. OK, to be clear, there are a lot of “ifs” here, and in our experience working with developers although not completely inexistent, this situation is extremely rare. In fact there are probably only a handful of common applications out there that approach this kind of scale.

To give you a better idea of how truly rare this case is, consider a weather application that tracks the location of its users in order to inform them of weather emergencies. In this case you will want to store the latest location of your users and perform a range search against these locations in response to a weather incident. Even the largest weather applications today have on the order of 10 MM subs.
Caching these in memory on a single host with native spatial indexing is commodity.

A second circumstance, and one I will get into more detail below, is when your spatial data needs to be joined against content that you don’t host. The most common example here is POI or “Place” data. This in fact is a very different problem. What’s needed here is either a hosted service providing the developer with access to spatially indexed Place data, or better, wholesale access to Place data that can be hosted and processed locally. This is not really a storage problem per se but rather a content problem.

4. Place Data and User Check-ins

The most common way location is shared today from the user is the user-generated check-in. Services such as Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places provide convenient, engaging ways for users to participate.

In this model location is associated with a Place or POI. Of course this means that there is now a great competition for who will own the standard, accepted Place database. This is a whole subject on its own and I hope to have more to say about it in a later post, save to say that the problem
remains unresolved.

As it turns out, there’s really no technology here. You could argue that collecting check-in data and spatially indexing that data for data mining purposes could readily turn into big data. That’s true, but what’s less clear is if this is a mainstream problem service providers will face. I don’t think so. What make more sense is for these types of location-based network providers (or a limited set of agents working on their behalf) to do their own processing locally and expose useful data to third parties.

For now the space remains fractured, and in order to provide effective tools that relate to Place data platform providers such as Location Labs are in a position of supporting an open-ended set of Place databases, unsustainable but a fact of the market for now.

@sahotes
CTO, Location Labs