I recently talked with Tasso Roumeliotis, CEO of Location Labs, about what the company has been cooking up in its labs, and one of the big initiatives is to upgrade 911 for the mobile social era.

For a little background, Location Labs develops several products including family locator and texting-while-driving prevention services that are available primarily through carriers such as Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile. It has also created its own bundle of consumer parenting services called Safely that handles location tracking but also includes Facebook monitoring.  Sprint last year rolled out its own service called Sprint Mobile Controls powered by Location Labs, that allows parents to see the calls, texts and applications of family members and allows them to lock phones remotely.

Mobilizing 911

Roumeliotis believes a next generation 911 service can build off these tools to make emergency calls more effective. In the future, when a 911 operator receives a call from a phone outfitted with Location Labs technology, they might get a file at the same time with information on the caller, including potentially medical data and who they’ve been calling or texting with from their phone. And, if Location Labs customers approve it, the operator could get access to the caller’s Facebook profile. That would be helpful for pulling up a picture of the caller but also seeing who the person might have been interacting with.

Another service the company is working on is to show the historic location of the caller, so a 911 operator could see how the person got to the location from which they placed the call. The service could also bring up contextual data on the caller’s location to see what events are going on at the time or what kind of historical incidents have happened there. All of this can be helpful in dispatching emergency workers or providing a better understanding OF the nature of an emergency, said Roumeliotis.

“We think if a 911 call is made, that’s an alarm bell that goes off and then all the relevant information gets aggregated in real time with contextual location,” Roumeliotis said.

While those services could take longer to build, a simpler tool that could appear by next year is a notification service that alerts parents or caregivers when a family member calls 911. Parents are often the second call made by a child in an emergency, said Roumeliotis, and most parents would like to know if their children are ever in a place where they need to call 911.

Roadblocks ahead

Creating this vision of a next generation mobile 911 service is fraught with challenges. Mobile 911 calls go to county call centers, which would have to adopt this system en masse for it to work. And the service would need to be inserted into a good number of phones with support from major carriers to be useful. Roumeliotis said Location Labs’ existing partnerships could help it eventually embed such a service on phones. And he hopes that counties would come around after they see the benefit of an updated 911 system.

And that doesn’t address the privacy implications of such a 911 service. While some parents might want to grant access to their kids’ Facebook pages to a 911 operator, their children might not be so willing. And some kids may balk at having their parents automatically notified when they call 911 because they might get in trouble. If knowing that a parent will be notified makes them hesitant to call 911, such a feature would defeat the purpose.

Roumeliotis understands the hurdles and says many of the details need to be worked out. But he said there are now a lot of tools at hand that can be used to solve problems quickly when a 911 call is placed.

While Location Labs has a lot to gain if it can become an embedded part of our 911 system, I am intrigued by Roumeliotis’ vision. Right now, calling 911 from a mobile phone is still very old school: Operators get a fix on your location via GPS or other location technology but it’s still up to the caller to explain the problem. I can see the privacy issues that could slow up this kind of a system. But it seems like with our connected devices and all the data available online, we can discretely use that information in times when it might help address an emergency.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

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Safely has proven to be a popular people-locator solution, so T-Mobile isn’t partnering with an unproven startup. Coinciding with the T-Mobile news, Location Labs announced its Safely service has now returned one billion premium “locates” on top-tier U.S. carriers. And by premium, it means paying subscribers: T-Mobile customers can use Safely free for 30 days, but after that, it’s $9.99 per month for up to 10 devices on an account.

Clearly, a billion location requests is a huge milestone; location services are becoming more important as a growing number of people, including kids, are making smartphones central to their lives. And without an iPhone, T-Mobile has no free “Find My Friends” iOS app. I do wonder, however, how many paying FamilyWhere subscribers T-Mobile will pickup when Life360 offers the same type of service for free and has been growing like gangbusters.

Regardless of sign-ups, this is another example of carriers trying to add value services: a growing trend as they hope to avoid becoming fast, dumb pipes.

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Sprint Mobile Control is part of the Safely product suite offered via Location Labs, the same company that’s behind Sprint’s Family Locator service. Sprint customers that opt for Mobile Control can manage and limit their children’s Android phones in these ways among others:

• Monitor voice and text usage in a dashboard.
• Set usage limits by time and day of week.
• Build a trusted contact list for incoming texts or calls from a specified group of phone numbers.
• See what apps are being downloaded to the handset.
• Set three apps for use when the device is locked.

Sprint notes in its news release that more than 75 percent of children between the ages of 12 and 17 have a smartphone, and as a parent I can see the need for such a tool on a phone. Or on an iPod touch, for that matter, which I’d expect more younger kids to have over iPhones and their monthly contracts. I don’t see any news out of Location Labs indicating an iOS solution, however.

With the growth of smartphone ownership at younger ages, there seems to be much activity in this space. MobiFlock, a similar service in beta, presented its solution at our Mobile event in September and it was impressive. I anticipate more solutions like this to emerge, especially as more of our activities migrate to connected devices and kids grow up never knowing what life without mobile broadband was like.

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The San Francisco company is branding its tools under the Safely name, which will encompass Safely Locate, a family locator service on AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint and Safely Drive, which prevents people from texting while they’re driving and is available on T-Mobile and Sprint. To those existing tools, Location Labs is adding Safely Social Monitor, a service that lets parents make sure their children are using Facebook in a safe manner.

Safely Social Monitor will allow parents to see who their children are interacting with most on Facebook and what photos they upload. Parents can get alerts when their children are tagged in photos or use phrases or words that are inappropriate. Parents can do all this with a dashboard that easily visualizes a lot of the data and doesn’t require them to sign-into their children’s account. Safely Social Monitor is available for free for Sprint users, who will have early access for a limited time. The service will eventually be made available to subscribers on other carriers.

The Safely suite of products is part of Location Labs’ effort to build a sort of anti-virus protection for families. Tasso Roumeliotis, CEO of Location Labs, said the company is trying to address a spectrum of concerns for parents, from the first time they get their phones, to the time they go online and eventually to when they get behind the wheel of a car. Said Roumeliotis:

“The creation of Safely was a natural next step for Location Labs. Our team has been laser focused on addressing the needs of families with our mobile and location-based services. Keeping up with kids as they engage with new technologies like smartphones and Facebook is a daunting task for parents. Safely answers parents’ primal need to protect their families and gives them valuable services they can trust.”

While Location Labs is branding its services under one name, it’s not creating a bundle with reduced pricing for parents. That’s because the location finder and texting tools are distributed and billed through the carriers while Safely Social Monitor will be more of a direct-to-consumer product. The social service will remain free for families but Location Labs will look to add premium features like special alerts for parents.

It’s interesting to see how family location-based services can serve as part of a larger tool set for safety. Location Labs is betting that parents see all of these risks as part of one larger issue for their children as they grow up, with mobile and social being related threats. Competitor Life360 has also talked of offering more robust family protection by partnering with home security firms to surface safety data all on one dashboard. As I’ve mentioned before, location-based services aimed at security have a lot of opportunity as basic family utilities. And it seems like location protection can be part of a larger suite of products that can be marketed together in some interesting ways.

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The company provides the family locator services for Sprint’s Family Locator, AT&T’s FamilyMap, and FamilyWhere from T-Mobile. Roumeliotis said Location Labs accounted for more paid locations of family members last year than Foursquare did of free check-ins. Location Labs has also struck deals with Sprint and T-Mobile to include its Sparkle Platform on phones, a management tool which prevents driving while texting among other things.

“What people are missing is location has a massive number of use cases beyond just location and checking in and really revolving around mobile personal security, safety and kids,” said Roumeliotis. “They’re huge services at the beginning of their growth.”

Roumeliotis said location services can serve like a personal antivirus protection for families, allowing them to keep track of members and keep them safe. The texting-while-driving technology, which Location Labs has patents on, also has a promising future. Roumeliotis said Location Labs is in talks with five insurance companies who are in pilots that would effectively pay customers to use the service. Additional services built on the same technology could also help parents monitor their children’s phones, restricting how kids use their phones for text messaging, photo sharing, downloading apps and surfing the web.

And all this is turning into a very profitable business. Roumeliotis said Location Labs is helping partners rake in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from customers who pay $5 to $15 a month for location services. That helped Location Labs become profitable about a year ago. Roumeliotis wouldn’t share the company’s current revenue rate, but in a blog post earlier this year, the company said it achieved a 200-percent increase in revenue in 2010 with profits growing 700 percent. The company could be ready for an IPO in the next two years, Roumeliotis said.

“Our economic ramp-up is of a public company,” he said. “The space is big and we dominate it.”

Now the company is poised to grow even more as it looks to sign on more international carriers. Roumeliotis said the company is set to announce partnerships later this year with one or two carriers much larger than any U.S. operator. Meanwhile, Location Labs is also growing its location-as-a-service business, helping developers build in location awareness and geo-fencing into their apps.

Location-based services still comprise a growing niche that hasn’t spread to mainstream users. And many still worry about privacy concerns when it comes to location services. It could be some time before many of these flashier services become cash cows. But Location Labs is showing that you don’t have to be hip to make money in location.

Image and thumbnail courtesy Location Labs.

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