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Eileen yu | Digital Technologies
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The future of location sharing
Location sharing has become the new standard for today's digital natives. The increasing trend of IoT and wearables devices, Artificial Intelligence and cloud computing have helped to boost the user experience and engagement for this technology. With many big companies offering location tracking services, people are more than likely to adopt this technology and use it regularly with two main factors - convenience and time. With such modern technologies, one can track a location or person much easier and bringing value for the time-craved.
Location-Based Services (LBS) and Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS) are the key technologies for this trend and the market expects to see a massive growth in this area from "USD 16.0 billion in 2019 to USD 40.0 billion by 2024, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 20.1% during the forecast period." (Market, 2019)
Being dubbed as the fastest-growing technologies, but before all this, where did these technologies emerge? What is it actually, and how did it become so huge today?
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LBS and RTLS explained
Location-based services (LBS) "use real-time geo-data from a mobile device or smartphone to provide information, entertainment or security." (Goodrich, 2013) Some services allow users to "check-in" at premises or events. Often, businesses offer rewards in the form of coupons or discounts to people who check-in.
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The first location-based services (LBS) first makes its appearance in the early 1990s:
LBS became a fast-developing research field only in the early 2000s, mainly due to the discontinuation of the selective availability of Global Positioning System (GPS) by the U.S. President Bill Clinton in May 2000. This discontinuation has made GPS more responsive to civil and commercial users worldwide. Since that time, more and more GPS-based applications have appeared, resulting in a strong interest in LBS from both academics and industry. (Huang et al., 2018)
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Companies well known for their LBS software include Google, Alibaba, Apple, Facebook, and in telecommunications, there is Etisalat, AT&T, Ericsson Inc.
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Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS) also known as Indoor Positioning Systems (IPS) "let you track and manage people or assets moving through your facility" (Arnold, 2019) by determining the location of a medium in real-time to monitor and analyse the movement with higher precision.
The first examples of a commercial radio based RTLS system appeared in 1998:
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The term RTLS was created (circa 1998) at the ID EXPO trade show by Tim Harrington (WhereNet), Jay Werb, (PinPoint), and Bert Moore, (Automatic Identification Manufacturers, Inc.(AIM)). It was created to describe and differentiate an emerging technology that not only provided the automatic identification capabilities of active RFID tags, but also added the ability to view the location on a computer screen. (Wikipedia, 2006)
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Some of the key players in RTLS are Hewlett-Packard, Ubisense, Zebra.
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So, in summary, Location-based services provide a platform for various users to use the location details for different purposes, while Real-time location systems are usually a blend of hardware and software to provide accurate location tracking. Let's further examine how this technological convergence will come into play and how it might benefit Singtel's current business innovations.
Asia-Pacific is growing rapidly in the industry
Fig1. LBS growth rate by region (Mordorintelligence, 2018)
From this map, the growth rate shown is high in Asia-Pacific and Oceania, but North America still has the largest market share.
Fig2. RTLS growth rate by region (Mordorintelligence, 2018)
From this map, predominately the growth rate is much higher in North America, Asia-Pacific and Oceania, with “Asia-Pacific to witness the fastest growth” (Mordorintelligence, 2018)
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Nearer to shore, GrabFood head Tomaso Rodriguez shares his views "ASEAN's middle-class population is set to grow to 400 million individuals by 2030 - roughly the same size as China's." (Singapore Business Review, 2019) and one can agree with his viewpoint on how the new generation of young middle-class consumers are highly likely to grow up in a mobile-first world, with convenience and tech instinct given to them as a nature of mobile connectivity.
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Location sharing is in the food-and-beverage space more than ever
A study found that food-and-beverage space has an exponential growth of 160% in 2019 for location-sharing apps. (Neely, 2019)
Singapore is no doubt food heaven for most, as one of the countries with the most extensive range of cuisines and food premises available. Currently, the location-sharing market space exists in the scene for companies that offer food delivery and food portal. Such as dominant players like GrabFood, Deliveroo and HungryGoWhere.
The demand for food-obsessed Singaporeans and convenience has resulted in the explosion of the food delivery and portal scene in recent years with many start-ups rising in the numbers. However, in the space of intense competition and dominance of Grab, there is still opportunity pointing to an “S$300 million total addressable market in Singapore for food delivery, and an estimated 4,000 restaurants and 12,000 hawker stalls that are not yet served by food delivery apps”.(Woo, 2018)
After all, as humans, we have to eat every day - and this is an opportunity to amass a vast number of daily active users (DAU).