Arabnet Arabnet

Location-Based-Services or LBS have been around for a couple of decades now. I remember in 1998 when I got my first Garmin GPS12 model with a monochrome LCD screen, and spend a great deal of time learning new terminologies like “Waypoints”, “Bread crumbs” and the difference between “Tracks” and “Routes”. In those days, street navigation did not exist nor did online geo-tag services. Then came the age of PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant) which saw a fierce battle between Palm Pilot platforms and Windows CE platform.

So till the early Millennium, Location Based usage was restricted to either hardcore off-roaders and Geocachers on the entertainment side or GIS surveyors in Oil Companies & Government Ministries and Municipalities, not counting the Military of course. GIS stands for Geological Information Systems. Then something happened, not sure what it was, all of a sudden, those PDAs evolved to include a SIM card (to call others), a camera and a built-in GPS and now they are more commonly known as “SMARTPHONES”, you know, those cute little colorful devices we just can’t seem to live without.

Internet connectivity combined with GPS opened up the door for LBS companies that started with GoWala and Foursquare (both launched in March 2009), Google Latitude (Feb. 2009) and Facebook Places (Aug 2010), no wonder since these two are always at each other’s throats.

And as usual, whenever the “Big Boys” start something, hundreds of “everybody-who’s-anybody” start imitating but with a twist such as Foodspotting, which is simply taking pictures of restaurant dishes and posting them through a social LBS-type format. That was in January 2010, then in December 2010, all Foursquare had to do is add picture taking to their checkins and voila. No need for a separate app called Foodspotting anymore, let alone a competitor called Chewsy.

Foursquare and Gowalla are still struggling to find the proper business model for their LBS business. Suddenly Gowalla decided to drift away from pure LBS to compete with Yelp who in turn had already decided to venture into Food outlet reviews by members in an attempt to copy the 1979 Zagat review that turned digital for more than a decade and which was recently bought by Google last September. Google on the other hand is exploiting LBS further into ILBS (INDOOR location based services) for malls and large landmark business districts, but we will leave this part for another post.

Then you have the non-food LBS apps such as Qualcomm’s Neer and Quilroy (both startups) and SCVNGR and … oh GOD I miss my Offroading Garmin GPS.

But in the wake of the LBS boom, how did the Arab region react? so far the supreme ruler of LBS in the region is still Foursquare with an estimated 300,000 users mainly focused in UAE, Egypt and Lebanon. Lebanon’s Foursquare users are not that great in numbers but they are the most frequent users. Foursquare’s dominance in the region is not expected to last for long since it does not support Arabic. Middle-Eastern users with a penchant for Arabic are signing up to IntaFeen, a statup by WStars. Speaking to its co-founder Dr. Maged Ghoneima during our ArabNet Cairo conference, I asked him how does IntaFeen compare to Foursquare and why should users move to IntaFeen? His reply was : “We started at the same level where Foursquare reached but our intention is to go way beyond Foursquare, not because we are better, but because our approach to LBS is different. While Foursquare is still struggling to find the appropriate business model, we have a business model in place. We are currently working on an upgrade to IntaFeen which we will launch very soon. Once launched, you will see that IntaFeen is quite different than Foursquare and presents a more down-to-earth and rewarding experience to the user, all in due time”.

On the other hand Jabbar Internet Group is getting ready to launch Sawty, a Gowalla/Yelp style LBS social experience. Whether it will have a mobile app to record location or not still remains to be seen, although I would not go there since people are not keen on sharing their travel experiences by typing it on a smartphone keyboard.