Bangalore:
Gundaiah Sridhar, founder of Yulop.com, a Bangalore start-up building a
presence around mobile search, thinks he has hit upon the next big
thing on the tech frontier.
It
is local search on mobile phones, using a technique called
triangulation, and the concept is at least a decade old. But, Yulop,
meaning “to come together” in archaic Kannada, is among the first
companies in India to be ready with a solution that identifies a
customer’s location based on base towers of mobile phone firms and then
allows the customer to find shops and restaurants nearby.
Yulop
has more than 150,000 business listings in Bangalore, and plans similar
listings in six other cities with each address “geo-tagged”, or marked
for their longitude and latitude, the geographic coordinates used in
mapping, to mark the exact location with an accuracy error of 20m. The
solution is based on triangulation, which determines the phone’s
location based on signal strength to the three nearest cellphone
towers, and relates that with an existing database.
“The
listings you find would be (of those establishments) within a 800m
(radius) of where you are located,” says Sridhar, the 25-year-old chief
executive officer of Yulop Websense Solutions Pvt. Ltd, whose calling
card has the firm’s geographic coordinates instead of a street address.
Yulop.com founder Gundaiah Sridhar
Users
of Yulop’s service download a software on a mobile phone enabled with
the so-called GPRS, or general packet radio service feature, used for
accessing Internet on mobile phones, to search free local listings.
Sridhar’s
start-up will soon face competition in India from global Internet and
phone companies such as Google Inc. and MSN.com, owned by Microsoft
Corp., and mobile phone maker Nokia Oyj, that plan similar search
services in the country—some using satellite-based global positioning
system technology and some mobile phone triangulation.
“They
can build maps and networks, but you need local data and that is
difficult to build,” says Sridhar, pointing to a differentiator in his
service.
Google’s India unit, which has mapped the
coordinates of business establishments across the country, by sending
an army of people with global positioning system, or GPS, devices,
plans to launch such a service on its Google maps on mobile phones.
A
customer can download a Google Maps application—it calls the service
“My Location”, dubbed the poor man’s GPS—and through mobile phone
triangulation gets near-accurate information on where he or she is
located.
The service has not been officially launched in
India, but users can download the application on a GPRS-enabled mobile
device from the US website and map road travel in big Indian cities
“You
don’t need a GPS device for this. The sooner we get regulatory issues
sorted out, we will make noise and (start) marketing ( the service),”
says Prasenjit Phukan, product manager for mobile services with Google
India. The search firm has not been able to launch its map service in
India due to a dispute with regulators such as the Survey of India, the
official Indian map agency, over showing sensitive locations and
borders.
Nokia, which makes two out of three mobile phones
sold in India, said it would launch location-based search in the
country once it comes out with new mobiles with maps at lower price
points, but did not specify a time frame for this.
Location-based
search “is not new and was never (a) success (in the past),” says
Thomas Leliveld, a director for sales and marketing for Nokia
multimedia devices.
“The building blocks like processing
power was not good, connectivity was not good...no GPS. The basic
ingredients are there now to make it (a) success.”
Nokia
plans to double the phone models with maps to 10 by end-2008, while
launching 25 models of phones with GPS devices globally next year. “It
is just a matter of time for having (maps) in every phone,” Leliveld
says.
Some experts say GPS devices or a combination of
location-based search using cell towers and GPS, would be the ideal
model in India, where concerns of privacy could emerge as information
is passed on to the operator.
“As soon as the operator knows
the location through GSM or WiFi, it becomes a two-way situation,
(where) somebody knows where you are and I think there will be lot of
resistance,” says Steve Brazier, president and chief executive officer
of Canalys, a Singapore-based technology market research firm.
Firms
such as Satnav Technologies Ltd, a Hyderabad-company that builds
navigation devices with maps of more than 30 cities in India, say
location-based services would pick up in India, where bulk of the
mobile phones sold are priced low and have GPRS connectivity as
compared with cellphones with GPS chips which cost more.
“The
location-based service will work in India for the next two years. There
is no clear business model now, but it will evolve,” says Amit Kishore
Prasad, founder and CEO of Satnav Technologies.
Others said
GPS would still be used for navigation. “Location-based service is good
to get (business) listings. But it can’t help in directions—for that
you need GPS devices,” says Rakesh Verma, managing director of CE Info
Systems (P) Ltd, which owns MapmyIndia, India’s largest private sector
digital map service firm.