The Gartner Hype Report has some interesting analysis of where various technologies currently lie along the hype curve.

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