With mobile gaming becoming a major player as smartphones transform into tablets and online gambling experiencing a resurgence with legislature in states like New Jersey, location verification services may be positioned for a big play. In the games industry you’re always hearing about the transition to games as a service, and now we’ve had a chance to chat with Rip Gerber, CEO of Locaid, about “Location-as-a-Service” (LaaS) and its role in the future of online gambling.
Locaid is the world’s largest LaaS company and the preferred gateway for many of America’s major carriers such as Sprint, Rogers, Cricket, Boost Mobile, Bell, T-Mobile, and AT&T T +0.39%. With location verification for purchases of utmost importance to the online gambling space, LaaS services may have hit online gold as the tables turn in states pushing to legalize online gambling. So how does it work, exactly?
“It’s a location data delivery model where privacy protected physical location data acquired through multiple sources including carriers, WiFi, IP addresses and landlines is hosted in the cloud and made available to enterprise customers through a simple API,” says Gerber. “In addition to the aggregation of these multiple location-data sets, Locaid also works with customers to provide a series of value add, location-based services (LBS) including Proximity Marketing and Location Analytics that use our Geofence API as a layer of geo-intelligence to transform location-data from a set of information to intelligence that can enable them to make better, location-validated decisions to realize greater operational efficiencies, increase security, reduce costs and optimize customer engagement, all while realizing rapid ROI. For the mobile gambling industry we provide a location determination that authenticates that a player is where they say they are when they place a bet in other to meet strict regulations.”
With Nevada, New Jersey, and Delaware already on deck for online gambling legalization, states like California are eying proposals. Others like Pennsylvania may have to wait a bit longer. But any state looking to tackle the challenge is going to need strict safeguards and regulations in place to ensure accurate location authentication.
“We’re the Amazon of location,” says Gerber. “We go to many different sources and gather the goods, but the customer only needs to go to one website in order to get what they need. And we’re also the Costco. We buy in bulk and pass it on to you.”
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
