The use of mobile location based services for things like navigation and traffic reporting is at the tipping point, according to Sean Ryan, research analyst at IDC. This is due to both an increase in the number of carriers offering services and the lowering costs of GPS chipsets, which will come down to a price that will see them as a common feature of phones, reports Wireless Week. As well as navigation (routes to places) traffic monitoring is big—which should be attractive to the carriers, because while getting directions to an unknown location is relatively uncommon, the route to work is something that a lot of people do almost every day, by definition.

Measurements: An interesting aspect of the article is the different ways companies have come up with to measure traffic: Some turn to companies like Intrix, which aggregates traffic information from government departments and GPS data from working vehicles to figure out traffic conditions; AirSage uses location data from Sprint’s 50 million users to get a picture of traffic; and 3rd Dimension simply offers an application that connects to traffic cameras. The eventual aim is to integrate traffic data and LBS into other applications and make the stand-alone applications more useful. For example, an application could report on an accident up ahead and suggest an alternate route. Although I did like the use of traffic cameras to watch the Macy’s Day Parade in Dallas.

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