WaveMarket enhances LBS platform with Microsoft Virtual Earth

By Dan Butcher

February 6, 2009

Microsoft Virtual Earth

Mobile location-based services and platforms provider WaveMarket Inc. has signed a multi-year collaboration deal to enhance its Veriplace platform with Microsoft Virtual Earth technology.

WaveMarket claims that Veriplace, the company's open location and privacy platform, is the first location aggregation service in North America, offering third-party developers live access to the location data of mobile users. The Veriplace platform provides wireless customers with privacy controls, ensuring that location data is never shared without permission.

"Microsoft Virtual Earth is best-of-breed mapping technology, and we're excited to offer that to our applications developers and to use that technology ourselves as well," said Tasso Roumeliotis, CEO of WaveMarket, Emeryville, CA. "If you want to build a LBS app not on the iPhone, but say, for a Sprint or Verizon handset, Veriplace gives you the location access for those phones.

"Sprint is first announcement, and we'll be announcing deals with other carriers this year," he said. "We are big believers that embedding location-based ads will be the monetization method of the future."

Already available on Sprint, the Veriplace Location Aggregation platform will soon offer location connectivity to a number of carriers globally.

WaveMarket's Veriplace Location Aggregation Platform

Developers can sign up for trial access to Veriplace at the developer Web site.

"Wavemarket clients, with our Veriplace platform, are driving location-based services from any mobile phone in the world," Mr. Roumeliotis said. "We're the first company to be granted the rights to sell the GPS location data that is on a carrier's phone

"We can sell data to build applications or for marketing purposes," he said. "The iPhone offers an open platform, but we're the first one to be granted permission by the carriers, in this case Sprint, to allow apps developers access to GPS location data."

In addition to enhancing the functionality of the Veriplace location platform for mobile developers interested in accessing location, this collaboration brings the latest Virtual Earth mapping technologies to WaveMarket's Family Locator commercial deployments.

The WaveMarket Family Locator powers family-tracking services on Sprint Nextel, Alltel, Bell Mobility, Aliant and MTS Allstream, Vivo in Brazil and SK Telecom, South Korea's leading wireless carrier.

WaveMarket specializes in mobile location-based platforms and services, offering a software product suite that includes both white-label applications and its location aggregation platform, Veriplace.

The Veriplace Location Aggregation Platform provides privacy and security systems to allow carriers to offer third-party developers location access without having to certify each application on a case-by-case basis.

WaveMarket has launched more than a half-dozen commercial deployments in the United States, Canada and Latin America.

WaveMarket's mobile platform components include turn-by-turn navigation, mobile social networking and tiled mapping, all designed to be commercially deployed with partner brands such as the WaveMarket-designed and engineered Ask Mobile GPS.

Founded in 2000, the company is financed by a group that includes Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Qualcomm Ventures, BlueRun Ventures (formerly Nokia Venture Partners), Intel Capital and Mitsui Ventures.

"As far as the current state of location-based services, there are two worlds -- the iPhone world, which encourages users and app developers to use and create creative apps, but big problem is that you don't know exactly how these apps are using your location from a privacy standpoint," Mr. Roumeliotis said. "Consumers have privacy concerns as to whether their location data is being used without their permission.

"The flip side is the carriers, which have the vast majority of location data, but only a handful of on-deck applications have been launched," he said. "Unlike with the iPhone, it's hard to get LBS, but the carriers have very good privacy standards, so consumers know the location data is not going to be abused."

Mobile marketers need to take consumers' concerns into account to be successful over the long haul.

"For advertisers and marketers, privacy needs to be defined very well and consumers have to be able control how their location data is used," Mr. Roumeliotis said. "If they don't want location data to be used for marketing purposes, they should be able to opt out, but if they're OK with it, then marketers should use that data.

"You don't want to use location for marketing unless the user has opted in and understands what's going on," he said.

WaveMarket believes that the mobile location-based services ecosystem still has some distance to go to regularly attract big-brand advertisers.

"We need to get location out there for mobile advertising to be more ubiquitous," Mr. Roumeliotis said. "Advertisers like Starbucks want consumers to be able to text in a keyword to a short code to find the nearest store and get a mobile coupon.

"Brands need to know that 75 percent of people who are going to see this offer are going to be able to click on it and get store locations," he said. "For big-brand advertisers to take mobile advertising very seriously, consumers' location data is vital."