Tobler's first law of geography states that the closer places and people are to each another, the more similar they are or are likely to be. This Newtonian-inspired law and universal truth for the physical world of geography has equally held true for human, geopolitical, and socioeconomic geographical patterns. The doctrine may soon need rewriting though.  Social networking applications of a flat, connected, instantaneous, and networked-world of social and human collaboration are beginning to challenge the principle.

I recently spoke with Shane Lennon, SVP Strategy & Marketing at GyPSii about their location-enriched social networking & publishing service now available on devices offered by Garmin, Samsung, and Ramar. Six months following their launch, Gypsii is on its way to plotting a future where mobile users record life events, with subsequent social butterfly effects ripping across the globe at blink-of-an-eye Internet speeds, bringing people closer together in time and place continuum's.  Gypsii use-cases range from northeastern US users contributing awe affinity to a post by a Norwegian user documenting a blizzard that dumped over 20ft of snow on Strynevatnet and the surrounding area... to citizens in China documenting the May 12 Sichuan Province earthquake well ahead of AP and other mainstream press coverage.  Citizen entries by Thomas Wa and Peter Wang following the devastating 8.0 quake depict a shattered world of loss, recovery, and hope, with stunning photos on location.  These amatuer observations were picked-up by mainstream press and shared instantly and globally which subsequently elevated hyper-localized awareness that lead to a pouring of social support and an influx of humanitarian aid from around the world. 

Gypsii's use cases prove that these kinds instantaneous power-of-place publishing and social networking services not only challenge Tobler's first law but also serve a better good, enabling communities of participants to exchange geographic knowledge across geographic and cultural boundaries, connecting the once disconnected through common sharing and affinity.  Tobler acolytes, anthropologists, and geographic information scientists... perhaps it's time to rethink older-era fundamental teachings.

One of the things we (meaning the LBS community) talked about in the early days of 911, was using call log histories to improve wireless coverage.  The idea is simple.  Take identity-ridden, non-intrusive logged caller locations (which include signal strengths) and create an interpolated GIS model to then isolate under served areas denoted by weak signals in a continuous field- red being strong, yellow being weak.  We saw this GIS modeling work as an opportunity to replace expensive drive-by systems used at the time by mobile operators to improve their coverage and optimize service.  While the idea was noble, it never took.  All the carriers we worked with just let the data hit floor and it was swept away into dust bins or saved only for odd court-issued subpoenas.  What a waste.

Since then, lots of folks have caught on to the idea that anonymous logged mobile locations in any transaction context can be used for all sorts of modeling and new data creation.  From traffic models to isolating target-rich advertising zones, modeling based on post-transaction analytics and business intelligence is the new trick of the Google era. 

Researchers at Northeastern University are with it (I think most around the world are.  City University in London was doing this in the late 90s).  Northeastern recently used 100,000 anonymous mobile locations to map social patterns of geographic interaction.  No surprise - we humans are for the most part sedentary creatures, staying within 20 miles of our homes (begs the question why we need TomTom's!).  Researchers hope to extend the data findings into epidemiological analyses and use it in a similar context to John Snow's famous cholera outbreak analysis map of central London produced in 1854.  It's good to see this advanced GIS work finally happening with LBS...

MIT's minds of tomorrow value Location in mobility contexts more than other features such as voice or messaging.  A professor there recently challenged his computer science students to develop applications using Google's Android SDK, and a majority of the entries focused on location-based scenarios. 

If the brainstorms of these MIT students are an indication, phones will soon challenge the Internet as a source of innovation. For these students at least, cell phones should be all about location, location, location. Most of the projects produced by the seven teams of students involved programs that let phones track people's physical place -- or that of their friends -- to help them do things and meet up.

Here's one example from project Loco 

In exchange for Nokia N95's and $250, 100 University of California at Berkeley students have signed themselves up to become part of a human sensor network experiment for modeling Bay Area traffic.  According to project research director Alexandre Bayen, the Mobile Century experiment is "applying data assimilation algorithms to traffic flow models (hyperbolic first order conservation laws) to integrate measurements from cellular phones into the estimation of the velocity field on the highway. Applications include travel time prediction, estimation of traffic density and congestion and ramp metering."

-ZDNet

APB posted a podcast revisiting the age old challenge of defining LBS. In lieu of older, no longer relevant definitions rooted within telecom regimes specific to cellular camps, I now use the following with academic peers and Saturday geeks squads who can't get enough. We think it's a more holistic, fixed-mobile convergence definition that captures Semiconductor, Mobile Broadband, Web, and Consumer Electronic Manufacturer perspectives across a diversity of networks and devices:

A Location-based service (a.k.a. location service, location-based application, location enabled service, location enhanced service, etc) is any information, communications, emergency, entertainment, or fused application service based on the determined location of any Internet-connected, un-tethered mobile or portable device. Devices can include laptop computers, ultra-mobile PCs, hand-held multimedia computers, personal digital assistants, Smartphone’s, personal navigation devices, personal media players, and other single purpose devices connected to the Web over an Internet connection - be it fixed or wireless.

What do you think? 

Qualcomm touted a shipment of 300 million GPS chipsets worldwide today. Sources suggest adding another 250 million to that tally by aggregating other competitive GPS silicon providers to the mix for total global chipset shipments. So, that’s approximately 550 million GPS chipsets deployed in various consumer electronic devices currently in active circulation. 

The below LBS History and Milestone chart [a piece I crafted for the IFTF] calls out an industry milestone of 250 million GPS chipsets shipped in October 2006, denoted by the orange arrow. In less than one year, we’ve doubled that count. To put it another way, recent GPS chipset penetration and gross adds in the last year equalled the same gross add growth over the course of the previous 6 years! Did we recently and silently totter over a tipping point?

Dr Mark Wright of the Informatics Dept. at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland has built a service that allows users to point and shoot their digital camera phones at structures in and around Edinburgh and send the photos to a centralized local database of superimposed virtual art.  The service then renders the superimposed multimedia image back to the users mobile device.  Dr Wright is hoping to repurpose the Microsoft Photosynth-like application as a way of adding context presence to blogs.  All of this sounds candidly similar to Nokia's MARA [Mobile Augmented Reality Applications] R&D project which is theoretically the closest thing I've seen to a Tricorder. 

Jack Dangermond, President of ESRI [and my former employer], reminds us of the importance of geographic information science and what he coins The Geographic Approach—a professional discipline that fuses physical and cultural geographic sciences and associated knowledge through common collaboration GIS tools. Jack reinforces the idea that while individual scientific disciplines continue to aid the discovery of geographic conditions and phenomena that are changing our environment, skilled professionals within these scientific communities who share information amongst each other through close collaboration are changing the collective knowledge of the planet through shared cross-discipline scientific observation. He attributes this cross-discipline discovery to GIS the tool, and says GIS professionals will play an instrumental future role in helping various scientific communities improve deteriorating conditions of our planet.

The Geographic Approach vision is one that builds off of a heritage deeply rooted in GIS Professionalism—an industry creation supported by scientific principles and academic discipline, and one that is currently challenged by neogeographers—skilled technologists who lack education or formal training in GI Science, bet yet nonetheless produce useful geographic information applications with standard Web tools and APIs. I was recently accused of belonging to the GIS high-priesthood by someone who considers himself a neogeographer. As unfunny as it may be, I don’t think of myself as either. I had not heard the term "GIS High-Priest" before, but apparently it’s one used by a group of disgruntled neogeographers when referring to GIS Professionals [a label received by default if you’ve been employed by ESRI], or to folks who have pursued academic qualifications and extracurricular pursuits to advance GIS professionalism. Well color me a High-Priest then. Ironically, I happen to have been educated under catholic scholasticism, monks taught me Anthropology, and I did put myself through Geographic Information Science graduate school taking my career quite seriously. So while true I am proudly affiliated with these communities, a guilty-by-association label as an elitist is unfounded and ridiculous. Take it easy man…

Gator students at the University of Florida might soon eliminate guesswork and save time waiting for campus transportation. The Regional Transit System (RTS) has plans to equip buses with GPS, which Sprint, TransLoc Inc, and the University Transportation and Parking Services dept. plan to couple with a Web and mobile service allowing student-subscribers to locate RTS buses enroute.

Rob Moffat at Wallace Wireless gets it! His RIM Blackberry enterprise customer discussions focus on solution sales where Location is positioned as a contextual enabler of other native Blackberry features—obvious ones like email. He notes business and government customers warm-up to LBS faster if qualified as a mobility feature that enhances mobile enterprise communications and information services, rather than as a standalone application. Ok, that’s a no-brainer for “insiders”, but an important piece of advice nonetheless. The thing I find concerning however is that most large businesses (and certainly governments) know and use GIS, intimately understand and appreciate the value of Location in a mobile setting, but yet GIS professionals aren’t included in dialogues between Wallace and IT folks running enterprise mobility projects! Are GIS pros still ‘down the hall’ in the rat lab working on offline desktop analytical science projects? I hope not. If that’s the case however, we need to collectively step up college-level education efforts to empower recent-grad GIS pros to influence enterprise mobility discussions with IT technical buyers and executive-management financial decision makers purchasing mobile communications applications and platforms.