Location-Aware Mobile Search

When you leave your neighborhood, or even time zone, your phone can sense you’re in a different service area, yet targeting for advertising and search defaults to your home area unless you tell your phone otherwise. Through a partnership between Sprint and Microsoft, users on the Sprint network can opt-in to an integrated GPS location-aware mobile search service. Additionally, Microsoft will include a version of voice search with visual results by Live Search using Microsoft property Tellme available for download. GPS-enabled search is a permission-based service, subscribers do have to acknowledge the GPS functionality of the phone in order to take part.

While there was no advertising immediately announced about GPS-enabled search, it’s ripe for geo-targeted ads. Sprint was an early adopter among U.S.-based carriers to allow advertising on deck. On the Microsoft side, it can’t be too hard to make inventory available to advertisers here.