More predictions on the market size of location-based services is coming from Gartner this time:

"Worldwide subscribers to location-based communications services on mobile devices will increase by nearly 168 per cent in 2008 while revenue will grow by 169 per cent, according to Gartner, Inc. Location-based service technologies have been around for several years but they have not experienced the rate of success that was anticipated at the beginning,” said Annette Zimmermann, a research analyst at Gartner. “The market for location-based services is at a turning point, with indications of mainstream adoption in the next two to five years.”

Now, I don't know where Gartner has been looking for the last year but the turning point was back in late 2006 when PND's took off leading to more subscribers for phone-based apps in 2007.

Gartner said the number of subscribers worldwide will rise from 16 million in 2007 to 43.2 million in 2008 and revenue will rise from $485.1 million in 2007 to $1,307.3 million in 2008. The number of subscribers is expected to reach nearly 300 million in 2011 and revenue is forecast to top $8 billion in 2011.

I had to read the press release more than once to make sense of ABI Research's latest prognostications about the growth of the LBS market and its use of "real-time two-way" (RTTW) communication for navigation systems. Boiled down to simple terms, RTTW means having two communication system on one device. The first might be the GPS receiver to support navigation; the second a celluar radio to receive traffic information. Regardless of the form, the result is predicted to be explosive growth. From the release, "Handset-based navigation, where the navigation processing is conducted off-board (not on the handset) is one form of RTTW connected navigation, and it will experience explosive growth. Off-board navigation will go from under half a million users worldwide at the end of 2006 to more than 70 million at the end of 2012."

In this week's issue of Business Week, the magazine reports that;the number of navigation-ready cell phones will hit 162 million this year, or more than seven times the number of such devices sold for use in cars or other nonphone gadgets, says researcher iSuppli." We posted a recent information from Networks in Motion (NIM) that indicated that of the $118 million in sales of downloaded mobile applications, 58% were for LBS apps in Q2 or $68 million. The Business Week article notes that LBS apps accounted for $92 million in Q3 and my sources tell me that Q4 will blow those numbers away.