Locating the market
Sarantel is a UK company that specialises in making GPS antennae that offer improved positional accuracy over most existing ones - especially when close to the human body, which usually impairs performance.
The market Sarantel anticipates for its antennae is in mobile phones, specifically to facilitate a class of application known as location based services (LBS). These could take the form of pedestrian navigation tools, location based gaming or location specific advertising.
The problem for Sarantel is that mainstream handset makers have yet to be convinced of the need to pay the premium for this technology and until they do, applications developers are unlikely to consider this to be an area worth investing in.
"It's a classic chicken-and-egg thing: you won't get the application developers interested without the right technology in place," said Sarantel CEO David Wither (pictured) in an exclusive interview with HEXUS.channel. "It's been in gestation for a long time - the mobile internet and revenue models had to be there first."