Jeff Mize from NAVTEQ announced the winners of the Global LBS Challenge at CTIA 2008 (Other NAVTEQ Challenges were held at the Mobile World Congress and past CTIAs; CommunicAsia (Singapore) will host an Asia/Pac LBS Challenge). Watch the replay of the awards.

Rob Taylor, Director of Forum Nokia, a group within Nokia that is responsible for promoting applications and new innovation, noted how well run the LBS Challenge is conducted. Nokia commissioned study that revealed that 6 out of 9 applications that they supported recently had a location component. N95 devices are selling incredibly well, too.

Semi-finalists:
America's Emergency Network; Gamepark; Duzine (Sportstalk); heywhatsthat (POI data); Proxido by Holloware; Phonetag by Knowledgewhere; Taxistop by Medianet (Taxi finder); Wildlab by Mediated Spaces; POI Cruiser by SearchQuest; Spotjots by ten23 (social networking app); Trapster.com (speed trap alert system); Twipster (travelers can share vaction experiences); Urban Mapping; MizPee by Yojo; Zoom by Zoospi.

...And the Winners:
Third Runner up: America's Emergency Network for their mobile alerts application.

Second Runner up: heywhatsthat

First Runner up: Mediated Spaces Wildlab

Grand Prize Winner: ten23 with Spotjots

George Filley of NAVTEQ notes the following facts in his opening statements at the LBS Challenge in Las Vegas at CTIA to provide a view of the current LBS marketplace:

• Surpassed 10 million milestone in downloads of LBS services
• Carriers are getting into the game
• CDMA devices are 94% GPS-enabled; GSM devices are getting there
• Applications for mobile navigation is going below $9/month.
• Critical mass momentum around open access and potential it holds for developers
• Applications are reflecting the livestyles of consumers
• Only 3% of LBS subscribers only using LBS applications but growth will be driven by carriers that must increase the marketing they are doing and including LBS as a portfolio of serivces that they offer.
• LBS must see continued innovation

I followed up with Jake Freivald, VP of Information Builders (IBI) on their announcement that the company was utilizing the Google Maps API to visualize geospatial data (see image at right courtesy of IBI). I wanted to know what led IBI to implement this feature in its WebFOCUS platform. "We needed to do for a variety of reasons," said Freivald. "What we are coding with latest iteration of WebFOCUS is to make it a platform for mashups. All you have to do with WebFOCUS is decide what data you want; what icons you want and what other drill downs you want to go to. It’s not a lengthy development cycle and we want to make good on the promises of Web 2.0."

IBI is not abandoning its relationship with ESRI or its tools, for which it had developed a interface to share and analyze data and pass back results to IBI’s business intelligence suite. In fact, IBI is just trying to deliver a less costly alternative.

"Customers love the idea of maps but don’t want to invest that much in mapping," said Freivald. "So we have a lot of customers who want maps but don’t want to spend a lot on it." Customers will still be able to easily to transfer data to ESRI when client wants to do it for more advanced analysis.