The biggest buzz word amongst developers and users at the moment has to be location based services.  Location based services, such as the GPS in your car, are certainly nothing new. They are,  however, becoming both more popular and more useful as devices embrace the technology and users become more location aware.

Mobile phones, such as the G1 and iPhone, have recently helped to boost the production of applications and web services solely build to deliver location dependant information.  Users have also become a lot more comfortable with sharing their location using services like Yahoo’s Fire Eagle and BrightKite.

So what is the benefit for developers in knowing a user’s location? First and foremost it enriches both your application/website and the user’s experience.  Because you are using multiple parameters (i.e. geolocation, time, search query) it helps you to quickly deliver the right results, without having to inconvenience the user with unnecessary form filling.  Secondly, it helps you to run a more efficient service as only relevant data is delivered to the user.

A good example of an application that would benefit from location aware services, would be something like the yellow pages.  A user would simply be asked which service they require, and upon entering a keyword (e.g. “plumber”) they would be shown a list of nearby plumbers.

LBS (location based services) are not just restricted to the iPhone and satnav, as browsers are starting to get in on the game.  Mozilla has played with the idea in previous beta builds of their browser, Firefox, and is set to roll it out in the next version.

It’s that time of year when people reflect and project. Rather than review what has happened in 2008 I am more interested in what is going to happen next year. What will be the ‘next big thing’ and who we should be watching.

After much reading over the last couple of months I have noticed an increase in chatter about Location Based Services (LBS). This is all about providing and aggregating content that is relevant to your location. For instance you may wish to find out where the nearest cash machine is to your current location or to track friends, colleagues and even children! It can also be used by businesses to provide location-based mobile advertising (something which has been done previously with varying success with Bluecasting).

A key enabler of these new services is GPS. Previously the size and cost of GPS receivers had ruled out their use in mobile devices (a rough location could be estimated by the cell site it was connected to) but now that are almost ubiquitous in new devices on the market. And with the explosion of the GPS enabled iPhone 3G and the Apple Apps store have exposed a huge number of people to LBS and created a real buzz. T-mobile’s G1, Blackberry and touch screen Android (Google’s phone operating system) based phones are following closely behind.

Who should we be watching? There are numerous LBS’ out there with huge variations in their usefulness but the following is a pick of what I will be watching: Continue reading

I’m running the half marathon on Sunday. I’m no athlete so in order not to embarrass myself I’ve taken my training quite seriously. By seriously I mean geekely…

It’s well known that I really like spreadsheets - for organising everything, and my training plan has been no exception. It’s got every 144.52 miles that I’ve run in the 19 Hours 43 Minutes and 47 Seconds of training that I’ve done. It’s also got charts showing my actual pace and formulas to calculate my normalised half marathon time from every run.

That’s all quite geeky but this may just top it…

It’s live so you’ll know where I am whenever I turn my iPhone on. After the race I’ll find a way of exporting a record of it.

GPS tracking powered by InstaMapper.com

If you happen to see this post while the race is on then please do leave a comment - I’ll obviously be otherwise engaged…