Berg Insight has recently completed a survey among 200 European location-based services (LBS) professionals in order to take the temperature of this important mobile value added service category. Berg Insight made the survey among LBS professionals at mobile operators, vendors and consultancies in Europe. There were two sets of questions asked to the 200 respondents, one to operators and another set to vendors and consultancies.

Berg Insight asked the operators which LBS applications they already have deployed and got not surprisingly the reply that the most common services today are information services such as yellow pages near you and local weather information. On second and third place came navigation services and tracking.

Berg Insight asked the operators which positioning technology they think will be the most important the coming years. The majority, 65 percent, replied a combination of two or more technologies, while 35 percent said A-GPS. It is obvious that satellite positioning is coming up as a preferred technology among operators in Europe and preferably in combination with other technologies such as enhanced-cell id and terminal-based positioning technologies.

Berg Insight also asked the operators what they think are the most important factors to get the LBS market to boom. Built in GPS/Galileo-chips was the most common reply, coming from 75 percent of the respondents. About 50 percent replied that more visibility and marketing of LBS is important to make the end-users aware of the services. The operators are also looking for more innovative LBS that really can catch the needs of the end-users, which 35 percent of the respondents answered.

The vendors and consultancies answered that the most important issue to get the LBS market to boom is built in GPS/Galileo chips in the phones (55 percent of respondents), which is the same opinion as the operators expressed. About 48 percent also answered that more innovative LBS that catch the needs of the end-users is important to make the market take off. The third most common issue to be resolved was more collaboration between operators, vendors and application developers.

Berg Insight has just launched its news site www.lbsinsight.com with daily LBS news. That site has the survey results attached including graphs that can be used for illustrations.

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