TripAdvisor, Google, PayPal, Heineken, LocalSocial, Qubulus, AKQA, Ogilvy, Vodafone and 120+ LBS and Mobile Marketing professionals to meet in Amsterdam – Attendee list just announced for the 3rd Annual Location Business Summit.

According to a new research report from the analyst firm Berg Insight, the number of mobile subscribers using a turn-by-turn navigation service or application on their handset grew 57 percent from H1-2009 to H1-2010 and reached 44 million worldwide.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan , 2010 North American Consumer Location-based Services (LBS) Market – The Wireless Carrier Opportunity, finds that the wireless carrier-generated segment of the North American consumer LBS market amounted to on-deck application software revenues of approximately $718 million in 2009 and forecasts this to reach $1.58 billion in 2015.

With cell phones increasingly becoming the nexus of the burgeoning markets for navigation and Location Based Services (LBS), the use of GPS technology in such platforms is set to explode during the coming years, according to iSuppli.

Worldwide consumer location-based services (LBS) subscribers and revenue are expected to more than double in 2009.
The growth is being driven by the higher availability of GPS-enabled phones, reduced prices and the appearance of application stores, according to Gartner.

The rapidly growing smartphone market is providing a much-needed boost for handset-based turn-by-turn navigation.
While PNDs and in-dash navigation device sales continue to suffer from the economic recession, the number of paying handset-based turn-by-turn navigation users will increase to 26 million by the end of 2010, according to ABI Research.

Ofer Tziperman, president of LocatioNet, spoke in detail to smartphone-biz.news about its free navigation and local search service amAze.
A pioneer of ad-funded mobile applications, he gave his views on the revenue model's future prospects - and the benefits of targeting mobile users with location-based adverts.

For a start-up like Wizi having Google launch a competing product might seem like the kiss of death. Not so with the Lisbon, Portugal-based developers who have welcomed the launch of Google's Latitude as a way of bringing attention to their instant location sharing application. The free mobile application allows you to share your location instantly by e-mail or SMS.

The smartphone market is likely to see big changes in 2009 - not least in how revenue is raised for services and content.
Kris Kolodziej, CTO and vice president of business development with Spime, told smartphone-biz.news that advertising could begin to subsidise the cost of location-based services to consumers in 2009 and 2010.

UK-based Vodafone is to acquire Swedish firm Wayfinder for USD $29.4 million-
The move is being seen as a bid by Vodafone to boost its location-based services (LBS) offering and drive mobile data growth.
Wayfinder's services are available in 19 languages to a global user base of more than 2 million.

Smartcard vendor, Sagem Orga has formed a partnership with BlueSky Positioning to integrate its A-GPS positioning technology onto conventional SIM cards.
A GPS receiver and proprietary antenna are integrated into the SIM card, which the companies say then enables mobile operators to deploy applications without the need for software or hardware changes.

Subscriptions to location-based mobile social networking sites will total 82 million by 2013, according to a report.
ABI Research says the growth in mobile location-based social networking will be a key driver for the uptake of location-based services.