21st
Will the Carriers give the Location business to Google
On Wednesday Google announced that they would be opening up a API for Latitude, their mobile location product, so that any developer with a users permission could get location data from there.
To me this announcement just continues to show the inability of the mobile carriers to leverage their competitive advantage over Google.
In the Location Based Services (LBS) race, Google’s product is at best a hack. The real place that a developer should be getting the location information from is the carrier directly, as I have said before. The carrier has this info and is the ONLY entity that can truly guarantee location of the phone and do it without ANY app or battery drain, 2 things which latitude is stuck to.
Even with Latitude built natively into the Android OS, it would still be better to get the info off of the carrier network for the above reasons.
What is amazing to me is that even with Google’s handicap in this market compared to the carrier, I bet they will actually succeed in this area not because of a technological advantage but because they understand the developer better than the carriers seem to.
