Location is an inherently valuable element in many different activities where the shared knowledge of the location of people, vehicles or assets means less hassle, and faster and better reaction.
Some other prominent features of High Revenue Mobile Services are:

• They provide a key competitive advantage in an existing business
• They bring about cost savings through higher efficiency and faster task completion times. These result from finding tasks faster, from finding the nearest person for a job, from utilising spatial information related to a task, and from automating routine tasks
• The potentially high cost of setting up a new High Revenue Mobile Service is offset by an application service provision model with a service provider, based on hosting and revenue sharing agreements
• The development cost of new location-based services should be kept low.

The last point is addressed by adopting Location Messaging as the generic service architecture. Location Messaging adds location as a tag to all wireless messages across different access technologies. It translates co-ordinates from a GPS device or a network positioning request to a street address in an SMS, or to a point on a map. All Location Messages sent and received are stored in a location enabled message data base called a GeoNotebook.

Examples where real benefits from these services have been obtained include:

• Planning biofuel transport in Finnish forests: Biowatti Ltd is a private forest resources company that caters for the transport of peat and firewood timber for the needs of a hundred medium sized power plants in Finland. Roughly five million cubic meters of firewood worth US$230 million are consumed in Finland annually, and altogether eight thousand people work in the peat fuel industry. It takes a variable time to unload a vehicle at the various power plants, yet a continuous stream of vehicles must be ensured at each. In the past, lorries simply had to queue when arriving at the plants, wasting valuable billable hours. Now, however, a Location Messaging-based transport solution provides for constant tracking of all vehicles over the Internet. This allows the fleet managers to reschedule transports on-line, all the time. GPS and GPRS-enabled hand-held Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) transmit the information to and from the vehicles
• Looking after people with special needs: A fleet of specially equipped taxis in Helsinki transports people with disabilities to their desired destinations. Such taxis are very spacious and equipped to provide space for wheelchairs. However, this fleet consist of only a few dozen vehicles compared with the thousands of ordinary taxis, and it used to be much harder to make economic use of them. Now, however, a GPS and GPRS-based communication system tracks the positions of these taxis and correlates them with the pick-up locations and destinations requested in order to optimally schedule trips. The Korsisaari Taxi Fleet Manage-ment Centre is expected to handle one million requests for special needs taxi transport in 2005 using Internet access to the Location Messaging-based Fleet Manage-ment system
• Tracking people, cars or animals: Hunting is a popular sport in Scandinavia, but accidents can occur. Hunting dogs get lost, and sometimes hunters mistakenly shoot each other. One of the largest animal tracking equipment providers in Scandinavia soon aims to change all that. Using Location Messaging and small, portable asset trackers tacked to each dog's collar, dog owners can track their dogs on the map of their PDA at any time. They can even open up a voice channel and order the dog to return to base.

The key to all of this is Location Messaging: a symmetric messaging technology where every user is both a content provider and a content user. Every message, whether by email or by SMS, has a location tag that associates it with a place.

Location messages may originate in an automatic device, such as an asset tracker, and contain status information (such as a car's remaining fuel) along with a place. A Location Message can be sent by a maintenance employee to indicate that she or he has completed an assignment at a given location and to request information on the next scheduled task.

Other examples bring benefits to different types of industry:

• A person selling timber to power plants indicates its location on a map on the Web allowing potential buyers to assess whether the journey to the destination is economically feasible, or allows a plan to be put together for collecting several piles of timber on a single trip
• Grocery stores and restaurants that sell or prepare meals using frozen ingredients can ensure that staff will be on site when such a delivery arrives by tracking the vehicles that distribute frozen food to allow an accurate prediction of their arrival time.

Location Messages are automatically transcoded between the Web, WAP, SMS and e-mail, as depicted in Fig. 1; the sender does not need to know the device or the access method of the recipient.

Fig. 1  Cross media location messaging - location messages can be
sent/received seamlessly between the system and a mobile terminal

A complete Location Messaging environment needs many other functions, too. It must be easy to store and retrieve appropriate Location Messages from a GeoNotebook by any key, such as location, sender, time or message type; it must be possible to manage individuals' contact information, as well as the type of devices they prefer. Moreover, it is essential to be able to manage the tracking rights given to other users from the wireless terminal of every user. An implementation of such functionality is illustrated in the case of a Fleet Manager application in Fig. 2.

Fig. 2  Modules of a fleet manager application layer and their general description

A Location Messaging application must integrate into the mobile operator's network and computing infrastructure: it must be able to request network positioning of a given SIM card equipped device; it must also retrieve appropriate maps, or Point of Interest data to provide a context to user generated GeoNotes. All access to the system must be billable, so a possibility to create records for billing must be provided. Finally, the environment must handle privacy and access rights to the various shared and private GeoNotebooks.

The middleware to allow High Revenue Mobile Services to access the mobile network, user data bases and location-enabled content is provided through a Location Messaging server. Static content is submitted with a fixed location, such as a Point of Interest, whereas dynamic content is generated by tracking or mobile positioning. Fig. 3 illustrates the way a Location Messaging server integrates into a mobile operators service environment.

Fig. 3  A location messaging server in a GSM environment

Mobile operators are key players in the provision of these services because what is required as an underlying transport is a reasonably priced GPRS network. The network must carry real-time messages between devices using GPS positioning and end-user terminals that will normally be PDAs. This combination is important, because the functionality requirements for these services exceeds those provided by standard handsets, and the accuracy demand is higher than that currently available from cell-ID based mobile positioning.

High Revenue Mobile Services require partners: there must be a mobile operator to provide for messaging and network positioning; there must also be a business sector specialist (such as an integrator or a distributor) that knows each particular customer segment and is trusted by such customers. Finally, a Location Messaging platform provides a generic technology to implement High Revenue Mobile Services, as well as many complete services for various customer segments.
The appropriate service distribution and pricing strategy can be decided on a service-by-service basis. As indicated in the examples above, it is crucial to identify the customers that reap financial benefit from each such service, and to have their trust. Partners that already possess this in each customer segment are invaluable in making each High Revenue Mobile Service a financial success.
Packaging High-Revenue Mobile Services should be done so that their cost can be offset against an existing revenue stream of each customer. Sometimes it is appropriate to embed this cost in an equipment purchase, such as a pre-paid SIM card in a car security system; sometimes the service can be bundled in a participation fee, such as in adventure treks, where the mobile service is paid for by the event organiser.

In enterprise services, the service cost is part of a partial redesign of an Enterprise Resource Planning or Supply Chain Management system. In all of these cases, the customer recovers the cost of the High Revenue Mobile Service quickly, without having to justify it as a separate investment.

Tuomo Kauranne, Chairman, Arbonaut Ltd, Helsinki, Finland