In a not-to-be-missed saga of impending world domination, Christopher Backeberg extracts the essence of about a zillion news reports, reviews and analyses on the launch of Facebook Places last week and its implications for location-based services (LBS)...

A nasty piece of spyware that contains a secret GPS location tracker has been found inside an Android mobile game called Tapsnake. Google is expected to pull the game from its Android app store.

A team led by computer scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has built on one of the strange principles of quantum mechanics to develop an "unconditionally secure" cryptographic method based on location rather than the pre-sharing of cryptographic keys.

INTERVIEW: Dr Martin Feuerstein, CTO of Polaris Wireless, on the current FCC proceedings.

Location-based social networks like Foursquare, Gowalla and MyTown have paved the way for dedicated, location-based dating networks, and some of them are even making money. Christopher Backeberg puts on his lounge lizard suit and explores some of the dating venues...

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).

WaveMarket, which has renamed itself Location Labs, will release a geo-fencing API along with its rebranded locator API which can locate 180 million mobile phones.

ValidSoft has started trials with banks and financial institutions to test location-based software that uses mobile phones to improve credit card validation. The solution is also intended to reduce credit card fraud.

Who should bear the responsibility for securing the privacy and data integrity of mobile phone users? Christopher Backeberg joins the chorus who chant that the primary obligation must lie with the people who make money out of mobile services...

Location-based advertising (LBA) has been discussed at length for many years and Gartner is forecasting that the overall mobile advertising segment will become a $7.4 billion market by the end of 2014. But despite all the noise and announcements - not least the iAd platform Apple announced this month - very few campaigns have yet been run successfully, writes Thomas Hallauer...