Nokia, a world leader in mobile communications, and WaveMarket, a pioneer in location- based services, have entered into collaboration to offer location-based tracking services to carriers worldwide.This OEM and reseller agreement will bring WaveMarket’s entire product suite to Nokia customers across the globe. WaveMarket has developed best-of- breed applications for both businesses and consumers, including family safety, pet tracking, enterprise tracking, mobile location dating, mobile locations searches and StreetHive — a friend-finding and social networking application.
Nokia will also integrate WaveMarket’s patented WaveAlert technology into its iGMLC network infrastructure. The first Nokia LBS application based on WaveMarket’s technology is Nokia LBS Push, launched at the 3GSM World Congress.
WaveMarket’s WaveAlert is the only platform offering active, as opposed to passive, alerting for increased location accuracy. For the first time, users can be notified when they are near something important to them, like a good friend who happens to be in their neighborhood, and carriers have a platform that solves the tremendous technical challenges required for alerting services. With patented algorithms that predict the location of all tracked assets in the network in real time, WaveAlert improves the performance of alerting applications by actively requesting location information from the user’s handset. In addition to dramatically reducing location polling rates and solving the problems associated with launching alert-based LBS, WaveAlert also reduces network costs.
"We are eager to integrate WaveMarket’s product suite into our infrastructure," said Heikki Hemmi, Director Location Business Nokia Networks. "As location-based services gain momentum in the mobile device community, Nokia is dedicated to providing an innovative variety of tracking and location solutions for each demographic market. We believe this feature-rich suite of location-based applications will appeal to a wide range of consumers."
"Collaboration with Nokia will leverage and expand WaveMarket’s current global presence," said Tasso Roumeliotis, CEO of WaveMarket. "We are pleased to be working with an industry leader such as Nokia. With this agreement Nokia will be able to provide its system customers with our quality location-based services for both business and consumers."
Location based services will have a huge, massive, we can’t even predict how big, effect on our industry.
Keep your eyes open. Things are going to get interesting.