‘Future of Mobile’ seminar looks at location-based services

Location-based mobile services could help Google increase its presence in the “largely untapped area of local advertising”, Garry McCollum, Google’s head of mobile partnerships, told delegates at today’s MediaTel Group seminar on the ‘Future of Mobile’.

Speaking on the morning’s first panel, McCollum said that location-based services and apps such as Google Latitude, which allows users to share location-based information with friends, are mostly about making the mobile internet more simple to use.

“We’re using it to target search results, eg cinema listings, and we’re building it into as many of our products as possible,” he added.

Also on the panel was Will Harris, director of telecoms at Enders Analysis. He agreed that part of the appeal of location-based services is the way they simplify things for the consumer. “Google maps tells me where I am, train apps tell me when trains are running,” he said.

However, he warned delegates who might be getting a little over excited about location-based services that while there is “growth around location… it’s not necessarily going to see a rise in search revenues”.

Locations that are sure to see a lot of mobile activity in the coming years are the Olympic 2012 stadiums. Steve Nicholson, chief executive officer of wi-fi specialist The Cloud questioned if the cellular infrastructure was in place to allow 60,000 people in a stadium to go online simultaneously.

Nicholson added that one network had already seen a 2000% increase in the consumption of data in 2009. “It doesn’t stack up if you’ve got more data usage but no more cash.” he said.

According to McCollum though, the problems around the increasing number of people using the mobile internet are not exclusively to do with mobile handsets, in fact, he said, “it’s more of a portable issue than a mobile issue – most data usage comes from dongles and laptops”.

He went on to say that there should be “different price tiers for different bandwidths”, as there currently are for fixed internet lines, although he added – and this was of course in keeping with Google’s “don’t be evil” motto – that Google wants everyone to have access to everything on the mobile web.

MediaTel Group has launched a new mobile database, featuring top sites, demographic breakdowns and mobile phone activities alongside case studies and white papers.