The geofencing market is expected to grow beyond traditional location-based applications in the coming days emerging as a market of its own right and reaching $300m by 2017, according to a report by the ABI Research.
Geofencing is a technology which uses the global positioning system (GPS) or radio frequency identification (RFID) to define geographical boundaries and the market includes ubiquitous, low power location, analytics, push notifications, geodata aggregation and detailed maps.
The report revealed that with the availability of low-cost developers’ tools the application is expanding beyond traditional location-based applications, to form the backbone of a host of new applications and services.
Developers are now relying on platform providers such as carriers, Google, Qualcomm, Esri, Urban Airship, and others to provide an easy, scalable geofencing service with the back-end complexities of supporting location-based services continues to escalate, the report added.
ABI Research senior analyst Patrick Connolly said that geofencing will enable whole new multi-billion dollar markets around the emerging areas.
"More developers are increasingly looking to pivot to enterprise applications, where companies are happy to pay for services that provide RoI, geofencing will open the door," Connolly added.
ABI Research practice director Dominique Bonte said that previously, geofencing tools were difficult to develop, expensive to license, and didn’t have a lot of use cases.
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"With location now ubiquitous across all handset types, and a choice of geofencing tools available from a multitude of big players, it will become an integral part of our daily lives," Bonte added.
The areas that will use the geofencing services in the future include retail, enterprise, push notification, local search, social networking and ambient intelligence.
