Applications of LBS and common use cases

The primary use of location-based services combined with GPS was and will remain the same: Navigation. There are new and exciting (and sometimes crazy!) ideas being implemented using LBS every other day. Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/) has predicted a market of US $10 billion for the LBS industry in 2015, from $2.8 billion in 2010. GigaOM (http://gigaom.com), a technology blog by Silicon Alley veteran Om Malik, has similar views on the LBS industry. Each year new location-based startup companies are being formed to bridge the gap between the vast information on the Internet and its availability for the local consumers/users.

Government and military, navigation, commercial industries such as advertising, social networks and web portals are the primary consumers of location-based services. GPS in fact was funded by the US Department of Defense (DOD) and still is maintained by DOD. It was initially designed for military use; in the late 1980s and early 1990s it was opened up for civilian use. Let us review the common use cases:

• Military: The US military uses GPS for navigation purposes including troops' movement. Target-tracking weapons use GPS to track their targets. Military aircrafts and missiles use GPS in various forms.

• Government: The government uses GPS for emergency services such as the US 9-1-1 service, which uses GPS to identify the caller's location quickly and provide emergency services on time.

• Commercial: Navigational GPS units that provide car owners with directions to destinations are the biggest commercial users of GPS. Air traffic control, seaport control, freight management, car and transport tracking, and Yellow Pages data management (local search) are other commercial uses of GPS.

Note

GPS is also used for time synchronization. The precision provided by GPS improves the time data by 40 billionths of a second.