Consumer information market to be worth $12bn

Different sectors look to get into lucrative business of providing information on end-users

Information on user's location is vital

Providing businesses with information about online customers will become a $12bn (£7bn) market by 2012, according to a new report from IT analyst Gartner.

Gartner calls this market "context-aware computing" – the use of details such as location, social attributes, and habits all help businesses anticipate what services a customer might need.

The technology could provide significant competitive advantage, according to Anne Lapkin, research vice president at Gartner.

"Initial implementations of context-enriched services are already in use, and early adopters will find it easier to implement more-sophisticated services in the future," she said.

"However, the real promise of this market will be realised when context information from multiple sources and multiple applications can be used simultaneously - but trust and privacy issues need to be addressed first."

Many types of vendor are vying to corner this market. ISPs already have large numbers of users about whom they collect a significant amount of information.

Similarly, handset manufacturers have the opportunity to preinstall context data collection and presentation tools on their products.

Social networking vendors such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Mixit and Loopt have rich information about their users, but weaker access to real-time contextual data and no location-based services.

Mobile networks operators also have a substantial number of customers and significant information about them - including calling patterns, subscriber data and handset location.

The challenge for businesses will be not only to identify the right business opportunities to leverage context information, but to choose the right partners and context providers, according to Lapkin.

"These are by no means trivial challenges, but enterprises that begin to explore solutions now will be better positioned to exploit the the potential of context information and context-enriched services as they become widely available and used," she said.