A number of different factors are driving market growth, including GPS and smartphone adoption, the success of new business models, continued growth of mobile advertising and the wider coverage and higher speeds of mobile networks.
Growing adoption of GPS is the key driver in location-based services. For mobile operators, this is an opportunity to drive new revenue streams, but it is also a threat because the access to location information is no longer their monopoly. In 2008, operators gained around 80% of all location-based service revenue.
However, while the market has grown more than five-fold, operators are now gaining only around half of the total location-based service revenue. The survey by Pyramid Reaseach indicates that navigation, local search and people-located services are the key areas for operators to target in order to increase revenue from these services.
