The Galileo Application Days in Brussels last week did something that too few technical gatherings do effectively - the event drew in droves of non-technical visitors. They came to interact with dozens of location and navigation applications that demonstrated what the Galileo project might deliver, writes Christopher Backeberg...

Mobclix has bought Heartbeat, a cloud-based iPhone sales analytics tool, from Enormego for an undisclosed sum.

This will be the year of Don't Drive Into A Tree, judging by the steady stream of new location-aware applications for safer driving. What's in the app stores or about to become available ranges from inspired to idiotic, writes Christopher Backeberg...

Microsoft has unveiled new augmented reality features designed to make its Bing Maps more true to life.

  

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:

IMS Research has stated that Nokia's free navigation could become more important than the free nav introduced recently by Google.

Waze has entered a partnership with Location World, a prominent South American mobile map provider, to introduce crowd-sourced maps and navigation to Latin America.

WirelessWERX has demonstrated its SiteWERX Indoor Location System which will greatly improve emergency 911 response to mobile calls for help.

Point Inside has launched a free indoor navigation app which it claims is the most comprehensive yet for shoppers at top malls across North America. The app runs on Android, iPhone and iPod Touch handsets

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: