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I recollect a cell phone company advertising about its network saying Geography is History’ a decade ago. Today the same company is offering location (geographical position) enabled services to its large subscriber base as a value addition - touted as its USP... Location enabled services have brought in a new dimension to geographical coordinates and information in human life and has become the core of one of the most promising business segments build around location technology. The growing market trend to utilize 'location' as an enabling tool to provide services has motivated a multitude of agencies to invest and develop tools and solutions to serve their customers better. We have seen remarkable developments in the field of positioning technologies, intelligent geographic data collection, system integration, hardware assembly, and above all, the means to delivery these services. Multiple tools are available today to locate one’s position under a varying set of conditions, eliminating the dependence on any singular technology. Off course different technologies offer different degrees of accuracy, but it is also quite evident that all kinds of users do not really require similar level of location accuracy.

After an initial setback around the turn of the millennium, the location industry is now all set to deliver its promises. Entry of large enterprises have demonstrated increasing interest of business community in this field, ensuring tremendous amount of capital, technical and managerial inflows, which in turn, is contributing to overall growth and prospects for this industry. Demand and supply situation with regard to this industry is very positive and in fact it is the location industry which is indirectly driving the GIS market as geographic data being collected and updated for location applications is also readily available for various GI applications. Economists, technologists and market analysts have made positive forecasts about this industry with billions in expected turnover, and the current trend does only support these forecasts.

We have also seen a tremendous change in the profile of Location User Community in last decade. Though, location industry initially was an offshoot of GIS industry, set to address a particular user segment seeking driving directions, it was soon evident that LBS industry cannot grow unless it is positioned as something which is an enabling tool rather than a solution provider. This has motivated technologists from various fields to explore and assess the value of location as a tool for their own business processes, which resulted in opening of the location industry to professionals from different industry and converted it into a truly multi-disciplinary domain.

GIS Development, a geospatial media company took an initial step (about two years ago) to bring out a magazine named ‘Location’, with an exclusive focus on positioning technologies primarily Global Navigation Satellite Systems. Reluctantly, we realized that we may not be able to do justice to the location community if we primarily focus on positioning technologies like GNSS. The configuration of the location industry is changing very fast and it has today multi-thematic stakeholders who play an important and critical role in the overall process of delivery of location enabled services. As a result Location magazine was discontinued for some time to able to understand and adapt to needs of different stakeholders of location enabled industry.

I am very pleased to present you the first issue of Location Magazine which is an effort from our team to build and strengthen the community of location technology practitioners/professionals/users and cover much wider and broader issues of location industry thereby providing a channel of communication between various stakeholders and a perpetually growing end-user base. I look forward to your continued participation, contribution and support to help us serve you better. Let us build this location community together!!

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