$3.3 billion in Location Based Mobile Social Networking

Yes there is money in location based social networking. According to ABI research , location based mobile social networking revenue will reach $3.3 billion by 2013. Iam a big fan of LBS based applications. This is indeed good news for startups that are building LBS based applications. I see a great potential in location based mobile applications including the mobile social networking. I guess mobile social networking is one of the applications that has potential to explode. Iam sure over a period of time, every social networking platform will provide location information of their users.

There are so many applications I can think off based on location and I have talked about them earlier . We are yet to see a mobile social networking leader and this is definitely a space to watch for. In addition, integrating all the different silo LBS apps into mobile social networking platform seems interesting.

Here are some highlights from the report: article(Info to buy the article )

“Location-based mobile social networking revenues will reach $3.3 billion by 2013, but successful business models may differ from what many observers expect,” says ABI Research principal analyst Dominique Bonte. “While location-based advertising integrated with sophisticated algorithms holds a lot of promise, the current reality rather points to licensing and revenue-sharing models as the way forward for social networking start-ups to grow their customer base and reach profitability. Recent evidence: the agreements between GyPSii and both Garmin and Samsung. Similarly, Loopt has established partnerships with all major US cellular carriers.”

Location-based mobile social networking constitutes a framework within which previously independently-launched location-based services such as search, friend-finder, people tracking and user-generated content find new momentum by complementing and reinforcing each other. Hence, it comes as no surprise that Nokia is moving in quickly with the acquisition of Plazes and the beta launch of the location-enabled Nokia Chat social instant messaging application.

It’s been a long time since I wrote about LBS based apps. So this news has charged me up. Stay tune for some interesting update on current LBS applications. If any of you guys have found cool LBS based apps, buzz( leave a comment) me, will include in my future article.