I usually lament that the MidWest has a dearth of technology conferences (that aren’t directly associated with automotive at least). However, I was very surprised to find out that just several miles away, next week there is the Mobile Location Enabled Services conference.

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)

Imity – the bluetooth proximity location service that showed up at Where2.0 last year and has been teasing me with their cool software has just open-sourced their code! (via O’Reilly Radar)

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.

After years of the mobile LBS market being bubbling under the surface, this Spring/Summer 2007 looks like it might finally open up.

This morning Research in Motion announced a new API for their Blackberries that includes support for API for J2METM”>JSR 179, the Location API for J2ME. Blackberries have had GPS chips for awhile, RIM even had a competition last year to create an LBS. However, I think this is the first time the API has been publicly debuted. They also released a mapping API via Blackberry Maps (not sure what they are yet)

In addition to the LocationAPI, RIM’s APIs also added a lot of other functionality for XML parsing, multimedia, camera, and file system. Definitely building a nice mobile-computing system.

That now adds to the upcoming FIC/OpenMoko Neo1973 which has a GPS chip and agpsd for location based applications, the Apple iPhone, uLocate’s WHERE Widgets for Sprint phones, the Nokia N800 and N95, both with location support via WiFi/GPS.

There have been a lot of mobile location based games, and services. But now that the API’s are becoming open and very easy to use (with the potential exception of Apple’s iPhone), small/independent developers can really produce innovative and interest applications for the devices. These mobile platforms serve as great devices for both publishing (geoblogging, geophotos, geotagging) and consuming (georss, kml) information from the geostack.

I am desperately in need of a new phone. My trusty Nokia 6600 has served me well, and still continues to chug along, but is plagued by bad sound, connection, small memory, and slow processor. I’m still drooling over the new Nokia N95, but not sure when I can actually get my hands on one (or afford it).

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.

With the rise of geographic-interest via map mashups, mobile location, and geotags, there is now a slew of sites rising up to start aggregating and collecting all the of the localized information and news.

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.