A Feature-based Model to Analyze Mobile Location Services

Summary form only given. As precursors of fully contextual and personalized services, a significant number of mobile location applications have appeared in the last years. The variety of their technological approaches and the peculiarities of their supporting business models have led us to propose a model to analyse location based services (LBS) from their main differential features. In order to build the model, an exhaustive analysis of the current LBS commercial offer has been accomplished. Basing on it, a primary classification of "horizontal LBS" into categories, has been proposed. These categories cover navigation services, tracking, group management, finders, location based content delivery, geotagged content making, social networking, location enhanced communications, location based billing and proximity applications activation (M2M). Among all these services, there are divergences about which of them will be real market demand pullers, but some analysts bet for navigation, family trackers and location aware billing. Apart from those, multimedia downloads with location related reproduction rights, information in mass entertainment shows or pervasive games seem to be other valuable proposals for final users.