Sometimes you think you know everything about LBS and how to get a positioning fix — then something comes along that blows your mind…

I've heard plenty about premature, “secret” cool tech that promises to revolutionise the location industry but never lives up to expectations. However, just as I'm completing research on the indoor space and contemplating the vast lack of choice in positioning technologies (although maps are apparently coming), along comes GloPos.

I meant to write a very exited blog about the new iPhone 4 having a gyro, which I thought would really advance the options to get indoor nav on your smartphone. It turns out there are $1 gyros and $7 gyros. Guess which one is in the iPhone and which one is useful for navigation…

The demand for gyros pushed by the iPhone4 definitely means that the prices are coming down, but let's wait a few years to see how quickly and strongly mobile gyro nav is adopted. In the meantime, trust Layar to show us what gyros can enable on a smartphone (and on the forthcoming Nintendo 3DS).

 

Coming back from the rather buzzy Location Business Summit Europe 2010 (i.e. MetaPlaces) a few things were clear to me: operators haven't yet written down their location strategies, LBA is a reality the agencies are now very interested in, and everybody thinks it's a great idea to build their own location database.

In fact, Wi-Fi sniffing is spreading among young startup, Google was first to overdose on the stuff...

Why is location changing the business of social networking? Because it is the missing link between virtual societies and the real world. Once I can identify the location of each member of my community, I can easily find ways to make money from it.

The value of location

 

Location has migrated beyond the navigation and emergency domain. It has come to be an expected feature in most mobile services.

This is the view held by John Kavulich, the amiable genius (in my opinion) who serves as business manager of all things location-based at Qualcomm.

While doing the round of the positioning technologies I thought it might be useful to recap what we know about Wi-Fi location and how the two main actors are bringing this technology into every single device possible, whether they are connected to the network or not...

Wi-Fi positioning is based on a company building and maintaining a large global database of Wi-Fi access points and their precise locations. This data is then used by a Wi-Fi enabled device to triangulate a user's position.

  

As part of the research process involved in writing the Great Location Tech report, I have been interviewing a number of GPS chipset manufacturers, including Atheros, Broadcom and CSR/ Sirf.

Their top-down vision of the market is very interesting as they not only work on making things work, they also need to focus on integrating location and costing location capability right to ensure the benefit of their research advances is felt by the users.

According to the techies, the general trends are:

GeoMob is one of those cool things in life, it's a simple but brilliant opportunity to catch up with the Geo community.

Kudos to Chris Osborne for organising it. If you're in London and developing LBS, then you shouldn't miss it!

The January event is next week on the 21st at the City University (thanks Jonathan Rapper! ) from 6 to 9 pm.

Yes it's free and yes the line up is cool:

 

Apple has just logged iPhone app number 100,000 into the iTunes store - and not surprisingly, location-based services (LBS) are only sparsely represented among the huge selection of apps now available.

The reason this comes as no surprise is that none of the app stores for any smartphones carry a large percentage of LBS apps. And as testers and reviewers have found out, the number of really good LBS apps for any make of phone or mobile operating system is low indeed.

So many new developments have popped up on the map of mobile navigation services in the last week that I suspect some players could be navigating on a catastrophic collision course with destiny unless they start rethinking their business models right now.

The news that's bound to make the biggest impact is Google's beta launch of its Google Maps Navigation for Android phones.  Its effects were immediate, as the graph on Mashable illustrates.