A new article in a mobile commerce magazine says that location based marketing is the most important factor in mobile advertising; with claims that it is “vital” to advertising success on smartphones.

The article concludes that while location-based technology is available, it isn’t always possible to use it to capture valuable data. It explains that “Users have to have their GPS on, give the app permission to use their location, have a clear line of sight to a GPS satellite, and so on.”

Whilst I don’t doubt the swift rise of location-based marketing for a second, I would argue that there’s a fourth fly in the ointment. And, it’s one related to managing the huge volume of data created by location-based services.

Location-based marketing is predicted to become very big, very quickly. So, businesses of all shapes and sizes need to start thinking about how they are going to handle that data now. And, it’s no ordinary data. It’s live, real-time, up-to-the millisecond accurate data.

It’s not a case of throwing some more tin at the problem or expanding the real estate in your data center. This data needs to move between your customers’ mobile device and your servers quickly to deliver services such as live pricing, offers, store finding, vehicle tracking and so on.

Technologies of the past, such as polling, just won’t suffice anymore because the world of location-based data demands performance and speed. Furthermore, the solution cannot break the bank either. So, doing more of the same just won’t work.

Effective location-based marketing (and other services for that matter) needs intelligent data distribution. That means software (or middleware to be precise) capable of analyzing data and only sending the latest or most relevant updates across the network. More specifically, if connection is lost, when it reconnects, you do not need to know a customer was at your store 15 minutes ago. You only need to know who is at the store now. This not only saves bandwidth but greatly speeds data performance and allows real-time services to scale.

Mobile data movement is changing the way business is done as we seek to collect more data and analyze it to make better-informed commercial decisions.