Amazon’s web services division has launched a new service which it says will make it easier and more cost-effective for customers to add location functionality to their applications “without compromising on user privacy or data security”.

Amazon Location Service allows customers to embed location functionality in their applications using data from Esri and HERE Technologies to provide maps, points of interest, geocoding, route planning, geofencing, or asset tracking.

The service is a direct competitor to Google Maps, and Amazon says its Location Service is as low as one tenth the cost of “the most common LBS providers”, and customers pay only for the number of user requests, assets tracked, or devices managed.

The company says that Amazon Location Service “eliminates the complexity” of adding location functionality to an application by providing a single, managed service that lets customers control what access providers have to a customer’s confidential data, cost-effectively implement location-based features, and easily integrate data from Esri and HERE Technologies into their applications.

“Our customers are excited to use location data to take advantage of the explosion of connected devices available today,” said Bill Vass, VP of Technology, AWS. “With built-in support for tracking and geofencing and a number of use cases that are as low as 1/10th the cost of the most common LBS providers, Amazon Location Service is pretty compelling for any company that wants to bring location functionality to their application using a fully managed AWS service built with the highest standards for privacy and data security.”

So far it is only available in certain parts of the world, including Ireland, Stockholm and Frankfurt.

(Picture – Amazon Web Services)