LBS revenues to top $13B by 2012

Increasing customer interest and availability of W-CDMA and GSM handsets are pushing mobile location-based services from the realm of hype into the world of reality.
A new report from ABI Research predicts LBS revenues will grow from $515 million last year to $13.3 billion worldwide in by 2013.
Personal navigation is expected to maintain its popularity among consumers, but friend-finder, location information searches, family tracker applications and enterprise applications like work force tracking and fleet management will also enjoy growth, said ABI. The firm said it expects friend-finding applications to become the next mass market location-based service.
“Personal navigation and enterprise services are projected to be the highest revenue-generating services of the five LBS categories profiled, and are forecast to be worth about $4.3 billion and $6.5 billion respectively, per annum, by 2013,” said Jamie Moss, analyst at ABI. “The interesting thing about the LBS content-producing sector is that much of the information is already available. It’s a win-win situation for content providers: they already have established markets for their map and POI data (automotive and telematics), and LBS is yet another that could potentially provide them with considerable additional licensing revenue.”
Some challenges remain before the market will grow, said the company. Those challenges include wider availability of all-inclusive data tariffs to spur service usage and cross-network interoperability of services.