James Siminoff

Location services just got bigger then big…

When I was reading TechCrunch this weekend I saw a post by MG Siegler, “Background Location Finds A Loop(t)hole On The iPhone”.  At first I thought that Loopt had found a way of running a background apps on the iPhone, which would be cool.  But as I read on I realized that the years biggest technological announcement was buried in this article.

For a long time it has been rumored that the carriers were giving out API’s to companies like Loopt that would allow them to see where the users phone was without having an app running on the handset.  From a technical side this should be fairly trivial, the carriers know about where your phone is based on base station triangulation.

I had spent a lot of time digging into this for the last few years and always ended up hitting dead ends.  Everyone who told me they had this feature in reality was just using a APP on the phone, draining the battery and eating up already constrained CPU and bandwidth on the phone.

Location has real monetization opportunity around it.  I believe that location based services will equal search in terms of market opportunity in the next 3-5 years.  The reason search makes so much money is because of relevance to the consumer something that location might have even more of.

So just hold on because without the friction of requiring an active APP  running on your phone there is going to be a flood of awesome new location services.  Not all of these will be entirely new companies, in fact location might be a larger opportunity for existing companies to improve relationships with current customers.

Oh and if you need an example, check out Fred’s new investment in FourSquare, wait till they get a hold of this API if they don’t have it already.