The shift to smartphones by mobile phone users has spun off new digital services. Smartphones are able to track and identify the user's location and owing to this feature, a host of new value-added services are being rolled out in the market. These services, collectively known as 'location-based services' will be creating a new genre of services that app makers, mobile operators and even merchants can offer to their customers. When mobile phone users arrive in a new location, the location-based services can auto initiative themselves and provide the user a whole range of information - from shops/services listing, special offers and sales, promotional activities and others. The location-based services opens up more upselling opportunities for all the players in the market, and the last-mile Mobile Operators are set to benefit the most from these digital services that they can offer to their users, especially when they can provide intelligent 'information' that is tailored to the user's profile, data usage pattern and other information collected from the network.
A new report by the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project on location-based services shared the following insights:
74% of adult smartphone owners say they use their phone to get directions or other information based on their current location.
30% of adult social media users say that at least one of their accounts is currently set up to include their location in their posts, up from 14% who said they had ever done this in 2011.
12% of adult smartphone owners say they use a geosocial service to “check in” to certain locations or share their location with friends, down from 18% in early 2012.
“The location layer is a core aspect of the smartphone experience, one that brings a new dimension to how people find and share information on the go,” said Kathryn Zickuhr, Research Associate for the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project and author of the report. “And for an increasing number of social media users, location tagging offers a new way to share context around photos and other information they share on their social networks.
