November 29, 2007
Tracking the hubby and kids, Wavemarket takes off
By: Sarah Reedy, Telephony Online
As family tracking services seem to be gaining traction in the mobile handset arena, California-based Wavemarket is emerging as a major force in the market. The mobile location-based search and services company announced its sixth commercial deployment this week, partnering with Canadian communications provider MTS Allstream to bring GPS tracking to its wireless customers.
The technology allows users to locate family and friends by using satellite positioning to determine the location of their wireless devices. Subscribers can also set up regular location checks, allowing them to be notified when a contact has changed locations. The service is permission-based, so only those who have given permission can have their location tracked. Typically parents use the service to monitor their young children from any Web-enabled computer.
Wavemarket’s Canadian deployment is the latest in a trend of GPS family tracking services expanding their worldwide footprint. Its Family Finder service is also available from Aliant and Bell Mobility in Canada and Vivo in Latin America. In the United States, Wavemarket’s biggest customer, Sprint, has been deploying its location-based services suite to power its tracking service since April of last year. Alltel also recently announced the launch of Axcess Family Finder, a Wavemarket-powered GPS tracking application. But the first carrier to launch a family-location solution, virtual mobile operator Disney Mobile, shut down in September. The service may relaunch in Japan, however, over mobile operator Softbank’s network.
Wavemarket faces competitive pressure from software developer AutoDesk, whose locator service is currently being deployed by Verizon. However, Rhonda Jobe, marketing manager for the National Scientific Corporation, said that Wavemarket’s style of packaging and pricing is the first of its kind that she’s seen. The NSC also offers a child-tracking device that uses local, short-range RFID, allowing parents to track small children or anyone who might wander away. The device sets off a beep on the "parent" device if the “child” device wanders beyond a preset area.
Jobe said that she has found that people like the idea on an intellectual level. The NSC had a similar product to Wavemarket that parents could hide in their children’s cars to track them while they were driving. This product suffered in its timing – the market was not yet ready for it, Jobe said, adding that Wavemarket might suffer from the wrong audience rather than the wrong time.
“I think the Wavemarket idea is good but don't know if they have targeted the correct market for this,” Jobe said in an email interview. “Teens are just going to turn it off or get another phone if they think they're being watched. And the teens that don't mind being watched won't be going to the wrong places. I can see a market for hikers, field trips, etc., where there is a possibility that something could go wrong.”
Despite anticipated consumer hesitations, earlier this year ABI Research predicted that, within five years, 335 million North American consumers would subscribe to LBS on their handsets. GPS capabilities were originally added to cell phones so that 911 emergency calls could be tracked. Now, the relatively low price of the service over mobile devices, typically around $10 per month depending on the provider’s plan, makes mobile LBS a viable way to also keep track of young children or elderly family members, who were the NSC’s biggest customer, according to Jobe. The service also acts an affordable alternative to stand-alone navigational devices, which typically cost anywhere from $200 to $600 from companies like TomTom and Garmin.
Tasso Roumeliotis, CEO and founder of Wavemarket, said that LBS is a natural upsell and a great way for operators to offer value-added services to families rather than just through lower-margin items like ring tones and games. He is certain that the family locator service and navigation services, both branded by carriers, will be the two applications that every single carrier will launch as GPS becomes more widespread.
Allyn Hall, director of consumer markets research for InStat, said in an e-mail interview that Wavemarket’s technology looks like an interesting offering that addresses one of niches in the LBS market space. The analyst believes LBS is one of the hottest opportunities for cellular operators and solution providers to get into. That being said, if users take the service too far, he does anticipate privacy issues arising.
“There are already concerns about privacy and ‘big brother’,” he said. “Applications of this ilk are sure to further raise these concerns. While tracking pets, livestock, small children and those with severe cognitive disabilities is easy to accept, tracking of older children and healthy adults is more problematic for all involved. I suspect that these concerns will slow the development of this sort of LBS.”
Wavemarket’s family service, targeted at younger teens, children or elderly, works around this problem by enforcing strict transparency between the operator and family, as well as between the parent and son or daughter.
“Parents think it’s a distinctive right of theirs to protect their kids, and this is a tool for them to do so,” Roumeliotis said. “Their privacy, as important as it is--what takes complete precedence for [parents] is their safety. That is why this service is so important.”
As the billpayers and essential owners of the phones, parents also have a right to see where their handsets are, Roumeliotis added. Children, who often battle to get a cell phone at increasingly younger ages, have the option of being tracked or not carrying or purchasing the phone at all. A more disconcerting issue Roumeliotis does anticipate is a consumer’s right to privacy from advertisers using a consumer’s information to send them mobile advertisments. But with a strict process for data protection in place and a chief technology officer with a resume that includes the U.S. Defense Department, Roumeliotis doesn’t see this an big problem. Location-based advertising has real potential, he said, but only as an opt-in or requested service.