Location-aware services - providing information, applications and services to wireless customers based upon their physical location - have been a long promised part of the next-gen wireless data services that seem to be finally getting off the ground around the world. We recently spent some time at the Cellular Telephone Industry Association (CTIA) conference in New Orleans, and saw location-based services in action. We walked away impressed from what we saw - location-aware services for 2.5 and 3G handsets (and in some cases, for short message service-capable 2G handsets).

Taking advantage of the New Orleans location, TeleCommunications Systems (TCS) showed an interesting application - location-aware wireless restaurant reservations using TCS's Xypoint Location Platform and services from partner GlobalDining. Hungry conference goers were able to use wireless devices to browse local restaurants and receive SMS messages on their mobile handsets confirming their reservations.

Now getting dinner reservations online is a cool application - one we'd use, if our mobile phone providers offered it - but dinner is far from the only application for location services. An obvious application, and one that is driving part of the infrastructure for more generalized location-based services, is Enhanced 911. Regulatory requirements are driving mobile service providers to add this functionality to their networks, which provides not only some of the infrastructure needed, but also experience deploying and managing location services for carriers.

Besides a location-aware infrastructure, location services have been waiting for another piece of the puzzle to be put into place: messaging services that are nearly ubiquitously available and actually used by customers.  In this area, U.S. mobile users have long lagged behind the rest of the world, mostly due to differences in price structures (like the huge included voice minutes in many U.S. cell phone plans). But usage has been increasing in the last year. We've seen studies by the research group Telephia that indicate up to 20% of all mobile customers use messaging services. Among younger, college-aged users, that number more than doubles.

What kind of services can carriers create with such systems? There's really a wide range, actually, but we'll discuss a few that make sense to us.  One good example is merchant-to-customer services like the dinner reservations service shown at CTIA. Location services allow merchants to take another stab at that much-maligned phenomenon of the late '90s: push services. But this time, merchant content pushed to customers is timelier and more personalized.