Big news! As announced today at the AT&T Developer Summit in Las Vegas, AT&T is opening up access to their location infrastructure as part of a trial program with Veriplace.
Like many tier 1 carriers, AT&T has the ability to remotely locate any AT&T phone (see for example AT&T FamilyMap). AT&T is now making this capability available to third party developers via Veriplace. This more than doubles the number of phones locatable using Veriplace, bringing the total to around 130 million phones.
As noted in the official press release:
"By utilizing the carrier network, Veriplace allows for a background polling solution, enabling developers to write SMS, Web, WAP and IVR applications that can employ location information even when an application is not in use. For example, a customer who signs up for a mobile weather application can give the application permission to send alerts about approaching storms or severe conditions based on the customer’s location, even when the customer may not have the app actively running on the handset. Additionally, utilization of the carrier network allows devices to be located both indoors and outdoors, to varying degrees of accuracy."
Many will be interested to know that this announcement includes AT&T iPhones. iPhone developers no longer need an application running on the phone in order to locate it, which means ever-elusive "background location" is finally available to all iPhone developers. Developers who simply want to remotely locate iPhones can skip the Apple App Store process altogether.
The trial program will launch in the coming weeks for registered Veriplace developers. Visit developer.veriplace.com to get started.
If I have this right your charging 7 cents a locate? Any decent consumer facing application will require approx 1 locate every 5 minutes or 42 cents an hour. Any real time verification of service level agreement or service updated etas will also require a similar if not more frequent locate pattern. All that said your prices have just removed your entire product offering from any of the more compelling consumer or enterprise applications. What services can be built that justify doubling an existing phone bill for either the consumer or the enterprise? very few if not zero.
ReplyDeleteFurthermore this technology is networked based meaning the developer has no control over the end means of locating a device. Could be cell tower could be based off ISP could be accurate to within 1 foot could be accurate to within 3.5 miles… ahhh now you just removed yourself from pretty much any relevant application.
A skilled developer in a single afternoon could write a mobile application that uses its internal GPS to report coordinates back to a central server (or you could just sync) the service would always be 100% tru GPS and you could do 1 locate a second if required for NO CHARGE.
I think your company missed the boat and big picture along long time ago. When these services first emerged in 2003 (Sprint plug-in for MS location Server) the larger companies like Microsoft stopped supporting things like their Microsoft Location Server because nearly a decade ago they realized that it would never take off when developers could do the same thing for free
Your company does however offer maintenance and support across many devices but again its not cost effective or accurate
Bill,
ReplyDeleteThanks for taking the time to share your thoughts and pose some good questions. I'll try to address each in depth below, but the take away message is that the 7 cents figure you cite is a low-volume test rate for developers who need the widest coverage. Commercial prices are generally substantially lower - as low as free - depending on the coverage, accuracy, and volume needs of the developer.
"Freedom Mode"
First, you are correct that some phones can run mobile applications that use internal GPS to report coordinates back to a central server. It's a bit tougher than you make it sound, especially if you want that location information reported over secure channels and only made available to sites and services the user has agreed to, but the idea is fundamentally sound. In fact, we've done exactly this, and we've made our work freely available to developers. We call it "Freedom Mode". Developers can locate for free any phone that runs our downloadable application.
The reality is that an application like this will only run on a phone with a fairly sophisticated operating system like BlackBerry, Windows or Android, and requires that the user download the application. For many of our partners, this is fine. They are happy to focus on a subset of the market. However, many of our partners desire wider coverage, and want to be able to locate their users no matter what type of phone they carry. That's where the paid locates come in.
"Professional Modes"
For partners whose needs go beyond Freedom Mode, we offer a set of "Professional Modes". Working with carrier partners like AT&T and Sprint, we can locate phones using a wide range of carrier-assisted, network-based technologies. Carriers have costs associated with each of these, which they pass along to us. We in turn pass along these costs to our developers. We are not looking to nickel and dime our developer partners. It's in eveybody's interest to drive down costs and increase volume to ensure a healthy ecosystem.
Carrier-assisted costs vary depending on volumes and the type of location requested, but are in the range of pennies per locate. If you sign up for a developer account and want to test carrier-assisted location on a one-off basis, we round costs up a bit. We do that to help cover the costs of providing support to developers before they've signed a commercial agreement and launched their application. It currently costs 3.5 cents per success if accuracy isn't too important to you, or 7 cents per success if you want the best accuracy we can provide for that phone. This is where your 7 cents figure comes from -- it's the cost to test high-accuracy, carrier-assisted location on a one-off basis.
Business Models
I won't say too much about business models, other than to respectfully question your assumption that every application requires round-the-clock constant locates. One doesn't have to look further than local search apps or family finder apps to realize that not every use case requires a locate every 5 minutes. That's not to dismiss more location-intensive use cases. We have developer partners working with us to make those work too, using Freedom Mode as well as paid Professional Modes.
Thanks again for your comment. We welcome skepticism and tough questions. If you think there's anything I didn't address, or you have more questions about Veriplace, feel free to get in touch by sending email to: contact <at> veriplace <dot> com.