ABI Research on “Smart Cities” Clusters Location-enabled technologies

The market research firm ABI Research has packaged a series of reports called "Smart Cities Research Cluster" that gather intelligence on the market size for a variety of location-enabled applications. These applications include

• Fleet Management
• Public Safety
• Smart Meters for Smart Grids
• Traffic Information Systems
• Intelligent Transportation Systems
• Wireless Sensor Networks

...and several more. It’s worth looking into if you have to look at the potential for each segment.

Field Service Management ROI Numbers

People are always asking us for the size of certain markets. Today at the Map World Forum, Prakash Iyer of Trimble offered these numbers for the Field Services Management (FSM) market based on an Aberdeen Research report, which he said was conducted in 2007. [Directions Magazine published results of a 2006 FSM report from Aberdeen)

FSM is predicted b to be $1.7 B by 2012

Market Drivers – better service; constant cost pressure; increased productivity; vehicle and driver safety; Sarbannes-Oxley compliance

Typical ROI

12% increase in service profitability
13% increase in vehicle utilization
15% reduction in average travel time per job
10% decrease in overtime pay
28% increase in driver compliance

The Economy: What Happened When We Weren’t Watching and the Implications for LBS

At the deCarta devCON conference, Jeff Rath of Canaccord Adams, an investment bank specializing in emerging markets, succinctly explained the current market bloodbath and what he forsees as the impact on the location-based services market.

Rath sees an unwinding of some of the macroeconomic dynamics for the first time in a long time. Leading up to this situation was a condition where inflation rates were trending lower and debt was cheap. This yielded an explosion of leverage and people bought a lot of things…much that they couldn’t afford, and that is becoming unwound.

"Macro economic dynamics are driving everything; companies are posting good and bad results but all stocks are trading down," said Rath. For much of the early part of the decade, Canaccord Adams’ Location Index, an index of publicly-traded location technology companies, outperformed the major market indices. In the last two years, that index has seen a huge decline where it now underperforms the market.

The hedge fund community is incredibly active in trading and represents 30-50% of the trading on any given day in the stock market. "Everyday you are hearing of hedge funds being liquidated en-mass," said Rath.

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