Business News Americas | December 31, 2010 | Patrick Nixon
Location-based service software provider Polaris is expecting operator interest in location to soar in Latin America in 2011, driven by its potential use for social networking and friend finding, mobile advertising, and combating crime, the company’s VP of international sales, Pedro Sotomayor, told BNamericas.
According to the executive, initial experiences with location-based technology several years ago put off many people, as accuracy was very relative. But accuracy has improved, and Polaris has been honing its focus on Latin America in the last six months.
Today, most location-based solutions require the user to either have a GPS-enabled phone – which Sotomayor believes is less than 5% of Latin American mobile users – or the operator to have equipment in the base stations.
Polaris believes it has an attractive solution because it is software-based and requires neither of the above.
Mike Doherty, Polaris’ product marketing and communications director, told BNamericas that the company’s technology can pinpoint a mobile device within 50m. The solution has been used widely by the US government in anti-terrorism initiatives and also in locating callers using the 911 emergency number.
The US is one of the few countries where law requires operators to include a solution that enables the devices to be located for 911 purposes.
“We live in the server. We don’t need to deploy equipment in each and every cell site. Unlike GPS, our solution does not require any equipment within the device, which means you can locate any device anywhere in the network, not just a GPS-specific one,” Doherty said.
“So when used for anti-terrorism, anti-criminal types of applications become important because the bad guys can’t disable the device, meaning they can still be located.”
Sotomayor added that offering a non-GPS solution has its advantages in predominantly prepaid markets like Latin America, where most customers tend to buy the cheapest handsets, which are not GPS enabled.
ABI Research has predicted that Latin America’s location service market could double to more than US$4bn in 2014, from US$2bn in 2010.
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