Overcoming challenges in delivering services to social networks in location centric scenarios

With the advent of ever more powerful mobile devices over recent years, an increasing wealth of technical functionalities has become ready for use at once. These were previously only available in separate specialized devices with limited functionality or non-mobile equipment. In addition, mobile platform providers have taken a more open approach, enabling community-members to develop applications for their platforms and to deliver them as readily consumable services to the public. Both trends combined have led to a significant increase in the number of innovative mobile applications. More recently, leveraging mobile users' geolocation for provision of services has become the focus of a number of organizations active in the field. In this paper we propose a solution that addresses some challenges when creating location based social networks and offering relevant services to participants in these networks. We have applied this solution in a use case with an Australian based transportation service provider.