SAN FRANCISCO—Suppose you could set up a moveable geo-fence that would alert you whenever a friend came nearby? That’s what Alcatel-Lucent has in mind with its Geographic Messaging Services Platform (GMSP).

The company also has two applications – social networking and mobile marketing – it has developed for the platform. The applications are branded Geopepper but Alcatel-Lucent says they can be white labeled. And the company also plans to open the programming interfaces for third-party developers to come up with additional applications.

Alcatel-Lucent believes it has an unique technology because the GMSP provides pushed alerts to user handsets when a geo-fence is crossed, according to Mark Disbrow, general manager of the product, which came out of work at Bell Labs. The geo-fences can be set up by individual or corporate users as broadly or narrowly as they want.

In addition to social networking and marketing, Disbrow said GMSP likely could be used for mobile travel guides, treasure hunts and geo-tagging, child tracking, traffic and weather.

For social networking, which could be integrated with online networks, Disbrow said a friend could geo-tag a favorite restaurant and another friend would be alerted when he or she was nearby. The first friend could then be alerted that the second friend went to the restaurant.

For mobile marketing, a movie theater could stream a trailer to a phone within a geo-fence, if the end-user had opted-in to receiving such information.

The platform works with most devices, even those that don’t have GPS, because it is network-based. A handset client also is used. End-users always have to sign up in advance for the content they want to receive.

Alcatel-Lucent has 11 patents for GMSP for geo-mapping, geo-fencing and the ability to trigger delivery of content or an application based on location.