Tell Me Where You Are

Shabhankar Ray is a active man.

As universal brand executive for Dutch wardrobe firm G-Star Raw, he privately takes a palm in all its selling and promotion - and he has no time for ideas that do not work.

But not long ago he motionless to deposit in a new selling apparatus which, he admits, he understands far reduction than his 14-year-old daughter.

He knows how the apparatus is meant to work from a consumer's perspective: a person uses their GPS-equipped smartphone to exhibit their place and in lapse they are offering special promotions from within reach businesses.

Yet he is undecided of precisely how such 'location-based marketing' will interpret in to bigger increase for G-Star Raw.

"It's a tour of discovery. At the company, we're all elderly 40-plus, so we've had to pick up as you go along.

"When it comes to location-based services, all I know is that you have to be there. How many people it will bring in to the business? I have no idea," he said.

The hurried expansion of Facebook taught Mr Ray that he has to sidestep his bets and put G-Star on as many not similar networks and platforms as possible.

"We've schooled how to be present on amicable networking sites without awaiting a correct metric or business return.

"We had no expectations from Facebook and right away you have a entertain of a million friends on there. Eventually location-based services will take off in the same way," he said.

Over-ambitious forecasts

Mr Ray might have meagre data to underpin his optimism, but he is not ill-informed. Even experts in this margin admit a major insufficient of hard data about the blurb power of location-based services.

"The large players similar to Google do let go a few figures, but they do not break them down so you can see what's going on", says Martin Garner, from mobile telecom investigate firm CCS Insight.

"The not as big players frequency let go total at all."

"There are nothing of the data and feedback mechanisms that businesses must be able to know that location-based services are a great idea."

Location-based services affirm to have millions of active users and hundreds of thousands of businesses - but that does not exhibit how ample allowance is being done by their platforms.

Mr Garner believes that this insufficient of blurb data is primarily due to the doubt surrounding a new industry, rsther than than any think over bid to conseal less-than-impressive statistics.

But at the same time, he acknowledges that location-based services are unwell to grasp on as rapidly as expected.

"We had a few sincerely desirous forecasts about location-based services early on, but they didn't truly advance to pass."

While Mr Garner still believes that location-based services have large potential, he believes that they are flourishing bit by bit since no one has nonetheless detected a hired gun business model.

Early days

There are many opponent location-based services, any of that functions in a somewhat not similar way, but so far nothing of them can affirm to be perfect.

Some services have been disposed to cheating, when users have found ways to distortion about their location. Others have been exposed to 'coupon-chasers' - people who revisit a business only to get hold of a bonus there, with no goal of returning.

Most major networks require users to 'check in' repetitively at a specific place before reception any discounts, but this can deter users who are demure to announce their place or patterns of transformation to strangers.

"The location-based period has only proposed and everyone is still perplexing to figure it out", says Michiel Verberg, owner of location-based app Whatser.

"It's similar to the early days of search, when you had lots of not similar looking engines similar to Yahoo and AltaVista, before Google unexpectedly came along."

Mr Verberg would no doubt similar to Whatser to turn the next Google, although it currently only has 20,000 users.

Nevertheless, Michiel Verberg has managed to appeal to Shubhankar Ray onto the network, and G-Star's Covent Garden store is right away one of its 80,000 endorsed places.

Part of the appeal is that Whatser users do not have to examine in: They are simply alerted to places that their friends have visited and favourite in the past. Real-time locations are not suggested and recommendations are presumably reduction open to abuse than checking in.

"If a buddy suggests a place to go, that is something you can trust", says Mr Verberg.

"I think the future of location-based services will not be about people divulgence their location, but about creation data more applicable and more trustworthy."