"The platform gives a lot of power to enterprises to communicate with their mobile workforce," says Barry Tishgart, senior director of wireless product management at Sprint. The service is well suited for field service automation, field force, fleet and asset management, he says. For example, a plumbing company could more strategically divvy up emergency calls among its field service staff by easily seeing which employee is geographically closest to the next job.

Schnuck Markets, a chain of grocery stores in St. Louis, uses the service to manage 100 trucks and streamline local deliveries. Schnuck Markets also teamed with application developer Agilis Systems to put together a new distribution system that is completely paper free.

Business Mobility Framework includes features such as presence, which tells a network manager if a mobile device is on or off; cell sector location, which provides the latitude and longitude of a mobile device; alerts that are used to send text messages to mobile devices; voice alerts where the application server calls any phone and plays a message using text-to-speech technology; and, location notifications, which are sent to the application server when mobile devices cross a specified geographic boundary

Bell Mobility in Canada is believed to be the only other service provider in North America offering location-based services (.com, DocFinder: 7330). The Canadian service provider is also using MapPoint Location Server software to support its service.

Sprints location-based service is available for a one-time set-up fee of $1,000, which the carrier says it is waiving for a short time. The monthly service charge is based on the number of transactions per month. Users can buy buckets of transactions for a flat fee, Tishgart says. For example 5,000 transactions costs $100 per month.