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.

I think the survey question is too soft ... it only asks if people want ads to be tailored to their interests.

I think a more telling question would be: Do you want ads tailored to your interests as the agencies have determined by watching your Internet behaviour and watching your purchases in stores?

I bet if they put it that way, the 'NOs' would go from 66% to nearly 100%. Generally though, I am supportive of the result: people object to these methods once you explain to them what is happening.

"Privacy advocates are rightly concerned.... It is the fact that people’s locations are being recorded “pervasively, silently, and cheaply that we’re worried about,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a recent report."

BBC's most-read headline talks about Palm being criticised for tracking users without their consent. In response, Palm said it took users' privacy "seriously" and said it gave phone owners ways to turn features on and off. In its privacy policy, Palm does explain that it will gather location info to help with LBS. However, critics were puzzled as to why it needed to gather so much data and why owners were not told about what it had gathered!

 

Last week Verizon released a software update for the Samsung Omnia that unlocks GPS and can be used by third party LBS app providers.

This means that, in addition to the traditional VZ Navigator app, other LBS services, including navigation, will have access to location.

For developers, this will resemble the Win Mobile environment they are already used to on other carriers.  

I just talked to Kim Fennell, the CEO of deCarta, a company famous for providing routing engines and geospatial data architectures that are now involved in car, web and mobile-based, location-based services. deCarta started on the web, providing the routing tech for Google Maps in 2005. Now that geocoding is becoming commoditised, deCarta focuses on mobile, connected nav and MRM.

There has been a lot of stir recently regarding the online advertising industry and user privacy. The LBS industry is watching. Congress is pushing for an “Opt-in” privacy bill, and the online industry wants at least an alternative opt-out option, rather than a mandatory opt-in, which they fear would destroy the revenue from precisely targeted advertising.