Market Overview

"The position and importance of location at the heart of the concept of mobility means significant potential remains for the utilization of GPS and location-based services (LBS) in a wide range of devices, to meet requirements for an expanding range of consumer and business applications." -- Geoff Blabber, Research Analyst, IDC

“The more you care about something, the more you want to know where it is.” -- Glenn Doreen, Forbes

Location awareness as both a business and a consumer market is a fairly new concept, but certain groups of people have always needed to track their whereabouts, whether by the stars or by using navigation tools. From the most ancient of civilizations to today’s modern world, soldiers and seafarers have always had to know their location as precisely as possible. As the Industrial Age dawned, workers in a variety of industries – from truckers to land surveyors to utility crews – began to demand the same types of location information as the military. With the pace of technology advancements ever quickening, the Global Positioning System (GPS), a network of 24 satellites that provide location data to handheld or vehicle-mounted devices on the ground, has become the preferred method for locating people and assets worldwide. Originally deployed for the U.S. military, GPS satellites can now be harnessed by a broad array of professional and consumer systems to track everything from produce shipments to children in a mall, underground gas lines and transformers, or a car lost in a vast parking lot.

The new, broader market for location awareness breaks into roughly four segments: Automotive, Mobile communications, Mobile computing, and Specialized handheld GPS and portable navigation devices.