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