Mashable and James, amongst many others, have excellent predictions that will and won’t happen in 2010. Generally they are good insight into trends in the geo and mobile space, although I will take up counterpoint to some of his suppositions on File Formats, Interfaces, OpenStreetMap and Augmented Reality.

File Formats and Interfaces

Geo is definitely becoming mainstream – everyone in my family has a PND, uses Google Maps, and are asking about various location sharing applications. In the next year we’ll see geo become part of the assumed infrastructure, like the timestamp on a post or article, the location will be embedded.

I don’t think TAG (Twitter, Apple Google), as James puts it, will be the only location sharing services. They, along with even more used Facebook, will definitely be the general public interface to location query and sharing – but just because of this reason alone they will have to be very generic, leaving room for specialized location based services to still thrive in niches. FourSquare offers ‘gaming’ or Flickr visual media, and others for music, drinking, sight-seeing, and house finding. They will leverage TAG, or at least TG.

Apple is like the Nintendo of consumer technology – more interested in providing an integrated, compelling experience, and privacy, before full open-ness and engaging with the developer or geek. They’ll still have API’s, but not something like OpenSocial, GeoRSS, or FireEagle integration.

The iPhone, and to lesser extent Android, have been revolutionizing mobile devices. They are truly providing windows into the rest of the web of data combined with the real world. It’s natural for geopatial tools to move into these interfaces, but like any good user experience it won’t be the same capabilities you find on a desktop or browser application. The utilities will be specialized for the small screens, finger inputs, and out-and-about tasks.

For file formats, the Shapefile, unfortunately, isn’t near EOL. Too many tools only speak shapefile, and there is numerous legacy data that is still only available in Shapefile. Sites like GeoCommons offer alternate formats for all the data, but that still won’t remove this basic format. Only when there is a truly open, license free, API to File GeoDatabases (FGDB), and every off the shelf tool can talk that API or Spatialite, will Shapefiles begin disappearing out.

GeoRSS and/or KML, on the other hand, will be in every service that does anything Geo. Looking at any iPhone App review that includes KML (or doesn’t) brings up this point. Near enough everyone has Google Earth on their desktop, and Google is making big pushes in the utilization of Google Earth Plugin for in-browser virtual globes.

Visualization Technologies

To date, we’ve been stuck with either Flash or JavaScript DOM magic (and yes, Silverlight is out there too) in order to do data and geospatial visualization in the browser. As I mentioned, Google has been pushing Google Earth Browser, but also more generally they released O3D, a modern incarnation of X3D, providing for more general capabilities for creating 3D browser experiences. VRML lives!

More recently, there has been a resurgence in vector graphics that don’t rely on proprietary technologies or additional plugins. SVG and Canvas support is pretty widely supported except in the infamous Internet Explorer (which I hear is still being used even today). Examples such as ProtoVis, Cartagen and Tom Carden’s experiments definitely demonstrate that SVG is just on the cusp of being able to do a majority of compelling visualizations capabilities.

Another driver for alternative visualization platforms is the drive to mobile device integration. I don’t see Apple allowing Adobe onto the iPhone anytime soon, and even Android doesn’t have support. What types of visualization make sense is still a very open question – but whatever they are will be done with something like SVG.

Geo Data Skirmishes

James suggests that OpenStreetMap “won’t dominate”. While it won’t dominate, I disagree that it won’t continue to be extremely successful.

Google has recently moved to gathering their own data. They still have a long way to go, with many, many errors in roads, areas, addresses, and businesses and they’re using the crowd to help clean it up. Google is in fact proving the crowd-sourced model. It will be successful. Google is doing it with Google’s data, so there is no positive external benefit to that work – so to the industry it just looks like another data provider. However, with this proven model OpenStreetMap will succeed since any effort built into OSM has a positive benefit to anyone else.

However, there is a major difference in the trajectory OpenStreetMap is taking in the United States compared with Europe and other regions. In most other countries, the governments had very draconian licensing and as such OpenStreetMap was creating data from blank areas – starting from scratch, and building a community of volunteers along the way.

By contrast, in the US a vast majority of the data is free, and becoming more available everyday under the new administration. Therefore the US has a broad coverage of decent data without having first built the user community. So the difficulty here is both in building out community, as well as engaging companies that can do the same thing on their own while retaining proprietary rights to the data.

What’s fascinating, and what signals the ultimate long term success of OpenStreetMap, is that US state, local, and federal government agencies themselves are engaging with OpenStreetMap. They are investigating how to put their data directly into OSM, and possibly even re-incorporate updates and modifications back to their own infrastructures. Some are even considering using OSM toolset as their infrastructure. OpenStreetMap is going through some growing pains with respect to licensing, maintenance, and community – but all necessary steps in moving from a small cadre of hackers to a global, public project.

As we see an increase in open government, specifically driven by the US Administration’s directives, as well as other initiatives such as INSPIRE, this embrace and utilization of open platforms, and repositories, for sharing, federation, and syncronization of data will increase.

And as for augmented reality, it won’t be as big as you think… yet.

Putting aside the question about whether Apple purchased Placebase, it’s more interesting and worthwhile to consider why Apple is interested in pulling in and working with technologists like Jaron that obviously demonstrate the ability to pull together components and build a compelling, unique mapping stack.

Apple technology has increasingly added location capabilities. Address Book, Mail, and iCal all detect addresses and provide links to maps. iPhoto and Aperture understand coordinate tags and can provide maps as well. CoreLocation on the iPhone, and now in Snow Leopard, allow any developer to get the location of the device via a cascading order of geolocation: GPS, Wifi, IP, etc. Apple themselves developed the “Google Maps” iPhone application – just utilizing the Google API for tiles, location and routing.

More recently, Apple has provided for “lost iPhone” tracking via MobileMe. Enterprising uses and developers have used this for friend and family tracking services.

Looking forward, it’s clear that Apple sees the important potential of location to support and augment almost all of their applications and platforms. Like any good business, the less dependent a company can be on third-party’s for core functionality, the better. Therefore, it makes sense that Apple would investigate ways to own and control this key component.

And beyond pure business and strategy, there is a lot to gain by Apple controlling it’s own location and mapping stack. Apple obviously focuses on providing exquisitely crafted experiences. This should permeate through their maps as well. Look at the maps to your local Apple store for an example of how the cartography can fit into the look and feel of the Apple.com store interface. This same customization can exist throughout their product line. Maps applications and API can provide customized interfaces and styling.

And consider that Apple can also build out a MobileMe friend finding and family tracking service. There is now an inherent trust in Apple tools: easy to use, virus free, great for kids. These translate over to trust in sharing my location through my phone to my private family sharing portal.

So in the end, what this signals is a major shift to provide broad, consumer facing compelling geospatial technologies in a well executed interface. Apple is already responsible for enabling location-based services to cross the chasm, and is inducing the broad emergence of augmented reality. It makes perfect sense for them to ensure they control and can craft the entire experience. I’m personally glad they have someone as expert as Jaron on the team.

As more devices become location aware, social uses will continue to evolve beyond just who and what, to WHEN. Adding the temporal dimension creates new opportunities for social interaction. Learn about ways to leverage and use technology to add features at the intersection of temporal, social, and location.

The panel is quite a great group – from the inceptive MapQuest that led the way in internet mapping, to the more modern social location networks of Brightkite and the recent Twitter announced location support.

We’re now carrying the equivalent of super-computers in our pockets that have near ubiquitous connectivity, location, media capturing, and sensors. We can easily lookup businesses, cabs, and directions. But what else is next? Is it really just people checking for the closest coffee shop or hotest hookup?

Or do people want to ask “The Big Here” questions: to inquire about their location and context – the history, environment, perception, and culture that surrounds them or guides them through place. Will we have tricorders, or will mobile devices be relegated to toy devices and glorified media viewers?

This panel includes the foremost implementers and leaders in the field that are building real tools that are used by thousands and millions of people around the world. What have we learned, and where are the next steps leading us?

SXSW panels work by people voting. So please vote up the panel. Last year I moderated one of the only location-based panels, but fortunately this year there is a much wider aspect of geospatial discussions and presentations. So while you’re at it, check out the other good panels.

However, what’s particularly neat about the application is that UrbanSpoon has been recording these “shakes” by location (inherent in the API call obviously) and created a great visualization showing the locations around the US over a day of “shaking”.

The heatmap essentially shows the evolving enquiry of people looking for a place to eat. There isn’t an actual time display or timeline slider to investigate – but I imagine there are interesting trends during meals, and particularly after normal eating times when people don’t have a plans on where to eat. In addition, a timezone lag that would show shaking progressing east to west.

Context mining of mobile devices, combined with geographic location – and especially via inferred geographic information instead of directly volunteered information can yield interesting trends on ambient behaviors. Imagine if UrbanSpoon could also collect the number of people in the group by detecting other repeatedly seen nearby bluetooth/wifi devices, previous meals of the day, and the ultimate destination and distance to the chosen restaurant.

It is readily apparent the increased penetration of mobile devices on everyone’s lives. In the United States the iPhone has revolutionized how people daily interact with online information – using Wikipedia to investigate local history and marine reports to understand the freshness of fish at the market. In Asia they’ve long had the capability to find nearby friends or potential mates, point at buildings to query reality, and instantly send live media to one another. In Africa mobile devices serve as the primary infrastructure for communications, payment systems, and even voting.

With people continually carrying both a personal sensor and data device it’s possible to glean powerful insights into behavior, desire, and action. Users are actively seeking to better engage with their surroundings and community.

The question is, how can we access this latent information in order to understand the individuals and offer them appropriate, and appropriately delivered, information depending on context. It is important to know if a user is currently traveling in a car to not interrupt them but provide information that is localized based on their mode of transit and trajectory.

A restaurant search is more valuable when it shows relevant suggestions 2 or 3 miles ahead then perhaps any restaurant that is 0.5 miles behind the car. Similarly, a pedestrian has no use for a search result that is over a mile away, but is willing to patronize within several blocks – but also depending on perceived safety and familiarity with the various regions.

The lecture was a survey of both the abstract concepts of mobile geolocation, proximity, trajectory and data mining, as well as examples of emergent technological and anthropological solutions. Flickr serves as a very coherent example of providing a hoard of information on user behaviors (time, content), lifestyle (pictures of children, parties, travel, business), and obviously location.

Services could identify young fathers of children that travel often and afford expensive cameras to offer child-care services, luxury family sedans, or maybe even high-end strollers (I’m looking at you Bugaboo).

And the techniques don’t apply to purely marketing needs. It would also be possible to use contextual relevance and behavior to understand the flow of a city for better planning. Of course, I could imagine more nefarious purposes as well as governments seek to track and prevent dissident movements.

The utilization and integration of mobile devices, or more generally ubiquitous computing, has yet to mature – but the platforms for experimentation and demonstration are now common and the general public is becoming more comfortable with at least the understanding of location-contextual relevance.

“If someone has the technical capability of building something in their basement on a breadboard … have at it,”

This is really exciting, and smart for Verizon to go the way of, well, the internet. You don’t have to be using “approved” hardware to go onto the ‘net. You just have to match certain protocols. Albeit Verizon will probably be a little more strict, but then again they are just the first. They build the network, you bring the concepts.

Of course, you have to wonder how they’ll charge when devices show up that don’t have a concept of “minutes of talk time”. From the PC World article: “Officials declined to discuss pricing details, only saying prices would be “competitive.” More pricing details should be available after a developers conference early next year, they said.”

Now I’ll have a much better justification to pick up that Cellular Quad Band Module with GPS and onboard Python interpreter.

We tried a number of methods – it should be as simple as changing the tile url that the Maps application queries. But initial “peeking” under the hood didn’t reveal where GMMServerURL is set. In the meantime – Mikel ended up finding the tile cache sqlite database (you don’t want to continually download tiles) and stuffing it with OSM tiles instead. So as far as the Maps application is concerned, its serving cached tiles. Pretty slick.

As Mikel points out, there are some issues to resolve – tile sizes are different on the iPhone, so the zoom levels are off. That would be easy to verify by loading a KML file with markers.

It’s also a slightly sweet answer to Google’s Cease & Desist to MGMaps for using the tiles. Mikel’s “hack” shouldn’t violate anything, he’s just be very considerate to his data provider by pre-caching tiles that have amenable TOS.

For Mapufacture Mobile we require the user to login once, and after that we recognize their handset and don’t require login. This new site supports OpenID (coming to Mapufacture soon too), which isn’t really an option on the mobile handset. The client is through uLocate’s WHERE platform, so sharing a session cookie from a browser isn’t an option.

Also add on to that the similar problem of having to remember dozens of usernames and passwords for different services, while you’re out and about, and have a limited screen & keypad.

This seems to be exactly what OpenID was made for. I should be able to register my device to OpenID (phone number, SMS verification, simple web client) and from then on, have a single sign-in on my mobile that then authenticates any service on that connection.

OpenID Personal Directory

Not only that, but I should be able to log into OpenID Mobile and have a bookmarked list of these services. So once I login, I can pull up my blog posting, twitter, email, phonebook, etc.

I haven’t entirely thought through the mechanics. The concept is simple enough for web-capable phones using WebKit (iPhone) or Opera or whatever. However, how do you provide this on devices or for users that don’t have a web browser – and also enable the entire phone, not just web apps or WAP sites as Laurent points out.

Perhaps this is where OAuth comes in. OpenID servers should provide OAuth capability. This way anyone can request a validation token that works with other OAuth or OpenID sites from my actual OpenID provider.

Overall, the device is very nice. It is Nokia’s best phone yet – great feel, (except there is a little play in the slider face), small, great feature set: WiFi, GPS, MicroSD, 5-megapixel camera with good optics and a flash.

The first thing that attracted me to the N95 was the good camera. I really wanted to be able to take decent shots while out and about in my life without having to carry a camera. The N95 is the perfect fit. I can take a shot, know it will look good enough for a candid photo, and have it uploaded to my online photo store immediately. Having it geotagged is a huge added flavor favor.

So getting to the GPS, besides the camera, this was the only other feature that was really a ‘must have’ for me – because of my fascination with location. Here is a list of the GPS-enabled applications that I use on a regular basis. There are some others, but I installed them just to play with them, and these are ones I use nearly daily.

Nokia Sports Tracker

great app for recording GPS tracks, can save as GPX or KML and even email. Unfortunately, no APP support (yet)

ShoZu

geotags my photos and uploads to flickr, automatically. I can also edit the title, description and add more tags

MGMaps

incredibly full featured mapping application, tracker, and local search. Recently got a cease-and-decist for using Google Maps Tiles (gee, wonder why), but fortunately I pointed out OpenStreetMap to the developer several months ago and within days he added it as an option (free maps on your phone!) Also handles displaying KML files and rumor has it, OpenSearch-Geo in the near future.

Zurfer and Zonetag

two projects from Yahoo! Research Berkeley that provide for uploading geotagged (and cell-tagged) photos to Flickr, and viewing Flickr photos taken near you

Twibble

geolocated twitter posts – also view your friends posts. Rather simplistic currently (your friends posts aren’t geolocated)

Mapufacture

more on this soon…

Missing Apps

While these apps are fun, there are definitely some missing apps or software:

• Plazes (or FireEagle, or some other generic HereIAmWhereAreMyFriends) mobile application – didn’t they use to have one?
• Atom Publishing Protocol support for grabbing nearby locations and uploading new locations and tracks
• Integration of GPS with LifeBlog

And here’s another major hiccup – The N95 has unlimited storage via memory cards – I am a technogeek, yet I still can’t get music or media onto my device. Yeah, there is a Nokia Media Manager for Mac – and my phone shows up in iTunes – but I can’t actually add anything to the device. I try to drag-n-drop and it just snaps back. Not there, no message, no music – unhappy user.

This is something so simple, and so fundamental to Nokia’s primary feature set I’m amazed that it’s so horribly implemented. So while I don’t need to carry another camera with me, and rarely carry my N800 anymore, I still carry my iPod for quick trips.

I mean what I said

As great as the N95 is, for as long as Symbian has been around there should be a lot more great applications out there. Instead, developing a J2ME or C++ application for the N95 (which may not work on the N80, or N6600, or N800, which means redeveloping for every platform) is extremely difficult and time-consuming. And that’s not even addressing the overhead required by a user to find and then choose to install your application – easily a 5-step process, that may even fail and leave unknown bits around you mobile that you later have to reflash to clean up.

Instead, Nokia should really team up with Opera to re-release and finalize the Opera Platform, a kind of iPhone WebKit competitor that allows developers to quickly build rich web-applications with hooks into the phone unit itself. I don’t want to have to worry about file systems, buttons, synchronization, et al. I just want to develop my app, send someone a link – or even better – build something like AppMarks, Leaflets, MockDock, or Gridgets (to name just a few that showed up within weeks of the iPhone release).

Macworld disagrees (via Directions Magazine). Specifically, Macworld said:

Add GPS support … [the iPhone] would be the ultimate mapping application if it knew where you actually were at all times

They’re confusing the issue. Geolocation does not mean GPS. GPS is a specific technology implementation of getting a location fix. It is also frought with complications that are most apparent in areas that people may use a mobile phone to find out what’s going on around them – that being urban areas, indoors, or anywhere that doesn’t have good sky coverage.

I have an N95 – that’s because I’m a geo-geek. I wanted to have programmatic access to my precise location so that I could write prototype applications for mapping, geolocation, and so forth.

I am not an average user

In fact, one of the most complained about features in the N95 has been it’s slow to fix GPS. Nokia finally got it better, from 74 seconds to 57 seconds, with their firmware upgrade.

That’s still almost 1 minute from turning GPS on (which doesn’t always happen automatically) to getting a location fix. That’s also probably in a decently clear area. This is all well and good – now I can see a moving dot in MGMaps (though not GoogleMap yet), or precisely geotag my photos.

Another problem with GPS – it’s a battery hog. I’ve killed my battery in several hours when using GPS, and even shorter if I leave the GPS on and indoors – leaving the processor to be constantly trying to calculate find GPS signals and parse their GOLD-codes (read more about how GPS works).

Personally, I get rather frustrated standing there (and anyone else waiting with me more so) staring at my phone, hoping for a fix so I can then take a photo. And remember, I’m a geek, I live for this pain – your average user won’t.

But I want my geo-aware iPhone!

My point is, geolocation does not mean having a GPS. There are numerous methods of automatically locating yourself that doesn’t require listening to satellites 24,000 miles away.

Cell Towers and WiFi are both simple, and accurate, methods of getting your location within 10 feet. This is the type of accuracy you may expect from GPS anyways. But you can get a cellular location or WiFi location in seconds – not a minute.

It also works indoors – and best of all (with respect to this post), the current revision of the iPhone has the hardware already. In fact, it would just be a software update to turn on geolocation on the iPhone.

The future is now

So I hope to hear less of people bemoaning the iPhone’s lack of a GPS chip – and instead ask the more reasonable question “Why doesn’t the iPhone do geolocation by cell or WiFi?” And while you’re at it, ask that the location gets exposed with Javascript hooks through Safari so web applications can make use of it.

You can still have your geotagged photos (what’s more interesting, that you were at [-23.538809, -46.618423] or São Paulo, Brazil?), find friends in the area, local pub search, or even maps near me.

If you want to see how something like that works – install the Loki Toolbar – which uses WiFi Geolocation – and then go to Mapufacture Search for automatic ‘nearby’ searching – no GPS required.

The agenda looks really good, covering topics such as mobile-social networks (mososo), user-centric mobile navigation, and the legal and monetization aspects of LBS. Speakers are from Symbian, Loopt, Cingular, uLocate, and a lot more.

So, sounds like a good warm-up to Where2.0 and also maybe bang on some carriers/providers and their lack of opening up their API’s to LBS developers. (unlike Sprint, which is ahead of the learning curve so far)

Tags: mobile, location, geo, lbs, mososo, loopt, ulocate, cingular, symbian, nokia, novi, michigan, midwest

As of today, our phone client is open source. New features, bug corrections, builds for new phones, it’s all open for your mad Java skills (or whatever you feel like porting to).

So yes, it’s in Java. Last time I tried to get a J2ME toolchain built on Mac or Windows it was 3 days of frustration before I gave up. Perhaps their service API is simple and could be done in Py60 or Mobile Processing.

If you haven’t heard of Imity before, the concept is that while geolocating you in the world is neat and all, what really matters is who is near you. It doesn’t matter so much that you’re at a conference center, what matters is that there are dozen people around you, some of you whom have met already, or will meet again. Imity tracks these proximity locations of other users, connects you when certain ones are nearby.

Really, geolocation is a good mix of the two. Sometimes it is just about me, where I am, and what there is to do there. And other times it’s about connecting me with people – and perhaps we go off to do some of the fun things in the area.

Imity also did some very cool stuff by prototyping their concept and code in Second Life, the virtual reality world. It was a great demonstration of using Second Life as a rapid prototyping environment (no need to build into real handsets and find other users in the world), and also did a good job at marketing.

Check out the Google code page for the software.

Tags: imity, geolocation, proximity, opensource, clausdahl, mobile,

However, there is another drool-worthy phone coming out in January. On the same vein as the Nokia N770 tablet, which is very hackable, the OpenMoko phone is a fully hackable mobile phone. GPS, quad-band GSM/GPRS, SyncML, microSD cards, apt-get install, Linux, GTK goodness. Future versions are expected with WiFi and Bluetooth. via Koen’s Blog

Also check out the LinuxDevices article which sports images including mapping applications.

Tags: mobile, openmoko, linux, phone,

PlaceBlogger is apparently just about to start. It’s an aggregation of localized blogs. Blogs with posts about specific locations, like the neighborhood or suburb rather than just a larger metro area – dubbed hyperlocal. You can see a mockup here. It’s like a Yahoo frontpage, but centered around neighborhoods or areas of interest. (via Susan Mernit

Another site is outside.in (read the announcement and some thoughts here) which is already released and has data. At first it wasn’t quite apparent how to start contributing to the site or marking up locations. They refer to the GMAP format, but I’m not sure what that really means.

All of these sites and tools are really exciting. This is the purpose behind tools I’ve been working on like GeoPress and Mapufacture. I hope these other local-news aggregators also use and support broader, open formats that we can all share and play along together.

Also check out LocoBlog, which is a mobile-phone blogging application and site as well.

Maemo Mapper is a free and open-source mapping application, designed from the ground-up for the Nokia 770. However, a large caveat is that it uses GoogleMaps in what is probably a violation of the terms of service (realtime navigation and downloading), not to mention annoying in that you have to “pre-drive” your route to cache the appropriate GoogleMap tiles.

GPSDrive now supports OpenStreetMap for downloading free maps.

I’ve gotten slightly involved in the new GeoClue project – an effort to provide an easy “location service” backend for devices. The location on the device may be served up by GPS, WiFi, GeoIP, Mobile Cell/GSM, or even just the user clicking on a map or entering an address. Then, an application can subscribe to the location service and get updated with the current location of the user/device and use it as appropriate.

At FOSS4G I attended a BOF (Birds of a Feather – people interested in the same stuff) on Mobile GIS. The software and technology all exist, it just needs some coordinated efforts to define the use cases, interfaces, and approaches. However, one solution won’t fit everyone. There are users who want to do “real GIS” in the field and there are users who want to do “neogeography” to say, find the nearest coffee shop on their mobile.

Tags: neogeography, mobile, gis, mobilegis, nokia770, geoclue, maemomapper, gpsdrive, openstreetmap, navicore, maps, geo

They address the issue in their FAQ:

After setting a Plaze the first time (e.g. by entering an address), it was necessary to enter an address again the next time I started the application at the same location. Why?

A newly discovered Plaze is bound to the GSM cell tower your mobile was connected to. The areas of cell towers overlap, so sometimes your mobile is connected to a different tower at the same location. Simply enter an address an set the Plaze a second time, then Plazes knows both cell towers and it will work better next time.

This is really cool. Geolocation by mobile without a GPS system is key to Location-Based technologies to take off and be generally accepted. Plazes is leading the edge of the community-based geolocated networks. Now time to build some services on top of their framework.

- via Henri Bergius

Tags: plazes, mobile, geolocation, location, gsm, gsmloc,

It is a full-featured GPRS/GSM phone:

• dual-core 312MHz XScale processor
• 64MB Ram, and a mini-SD flash slot
• 1.3 megapixel camera
• Bluetooth
• WiFi networking

Looking at the success Nokia has had with exposing various developer interfaces to their mobile phones and N770 tablet (Maemo), I think there is a huge market for an “openphone”. When I first heard of the O’Reilly Telephony Conference, I pictured people sitting around with their antiquated telephones, talking about switchboards and the like. I guess it’s a lot cooler scene than that.

Additionally, hopefully Open-hardware like mobile phones and tablets will kick the closed-minded carriers into realizing they’re slowly strangling themselves by keeping everything closed and begin to work with the huge, untapped, hobbyist and developer community.

Tags: mobile, phone, gsm, gprs, trolltech, qtopia, nokia, n770, maemo, pys60,

Particularly interesting to me is the analysis of LBS.

Location-aware technologies should hit maturity in less than two years. Location-aware technology is the use of GPS (global positioning system), assisted GPS (A-GPS), Enhanced Observed Time Difference (EOTD), enhanced GPS (E-GPS), and other technologies in the cellular network and handset to locate a mobile user.

Location-aware applications will hit mainsteam adoption in the next two to five years.

Nextel phones in the US already have exposed the location API to developers. Lots of other devices are using them now for finding friends or getting info on various locations.

Interesting, they also state that maintstream adoption of the semantic web is five to ten years away. I’m surprised that they predict so far out with the growing support for Microformats and other semantic technologies that are being used by Yahoo, Technorati, and search engines such as Swoogle which require content to already exist in order to have something to search. See the article Geospatial Semantic Web Blog: Pinging the Semantic Web for some more discussion on how to spread the use of the semantic web using ping services

Tags: geolocation, location, lbs, mobile, gps, hype, gartner, mologogo, dodgeball, geovector, swoogle, semantic, microformats, ping,

Previous mobile applications were relegated to simple applications, or Brew/J2ME applications that were carrier specific, limited in use, and non-upgradeable. By contrast, full featured mobile web browsers like Opera Mobile provide a common base to deploy applications via web interfaces. This could be compared to the effect a standards based, open-browser like Firefox spawned Web2.0. Give users a single, stable application, and developers a common framework in which to deploy the UI for applications, and things will happen.

This article on Getting Mobile, by Brian Fling of BlueFlavor is a good introduction to some of the current hurdles in developing a mobile application or site.

What is particularly scary is the control mobile carriers have in North America. This was definitely illustrated for the niche geo-market at Where2.0, where US mobile operators refuse to open the location-interface for mobile phones (except Nextel, and limited Nokia phones).

However, I think this is the same powerplay that Microsoft was pulling in the ’90s. Standards and open-platforms will emerge that will enable developers and companies to provide various tools and utilities to users on the go.

Tags: mobile, web2.0, web3.0, blueflavor, firefox, opera,