Startups bet on Location Based Services in India
By siliconindia   |   Saturday, 06 June 2009, 00:26 IST   |    16 Comments
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Startups bet on Location Based Services in India
Bangalore: Location Based Services (LBS) in India is still in its nascent stage. Although currently there are around 400 million mobile users in India as per a report by Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), location based services are yet to catch up. According to a report on LBS, mobile VAS accounts to around 10 percent of the total telecom revenues and LBS constitutes nearly 38 percent of the total VAS revenue. Onze technologies, Mapmyindia, Interchain Solutions and Yulop are a few startups that are betting on location based services in India. "There are a lot of challenges that the LBS industry in India is facing currently and most important of these is availability of accurate GIS (Geographic Information System)," says Sudarshan H S, CEO of Onze Technologies, which provides services in Bangalore, Chennai and Mumbai. Sudarshan says, "The problem lies in the fact that the current GIS data has been built for other requirements and not for LBS." As per a report prepared by Indicus Analytics for the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), although the range of available solutions is wide, there is not enough supporting evidence of adoption of LBS by the magnitude of people. The report says, "To some extent this could be due to lack of awareness amongst consumers, but it also implies that application developers need to generate more relevant applications and these solutions must be marketed more effectively in the public eye." Currently the Indian market is in a very nascent stage. "The reason why it is still nascent in India is that, using LBS calls for complete behavioral change as people here are not so much into using navigation maps," says Vishnu Sundaram, Founder of Bangalore based Interchain solutions. "It will take time before India can have accurate GIS data and the right devices. But the future is bright." While the Indian LBS market stood at $22 million in 2007, the U.S. LBS market in the same year was $270million. The same report predicts that by 2012 the U.S. market would grow to at least $2.1 billion, whereas the Indian market would grow to around $500 million. The Indian entrepreneurs are thinking big to tap this market in India. siliconindia startupcity on June 6 is showcasing these startups at Bangalore. Rush to meet them at Startupcity. http://https://siliconindia.com/startupcity_09/index.php"

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