Rather than a dedicated stovepipe fit for specific purpose and application, mobile and portable Location is increasingly being viewed by the larger Web and IT worlds as an enabling feature that adds context and geographic dimension to all applications.

Ray Ozzie’s keynote at mix07 reinforced this concept suggesting that “a common design pattern has emerged for this new era of desktop/web/mobile apps - desktop for richness, browser for tagging and other collaboration/community features, mobile for location-specific information”.

And IBM agrees with the mobile part, suggesting that mobile-location-added context will be one of the 5 innovations over the next 5 years that will change our lives.

-IBM
-Read/Write Web

There’s a battle line drawn for local mobile search, with carriers on one side and Web properties on the other side. Sure, we’ve seen a few carrier-managed and distributed POI apps; sure, we’ve seen Web property efforts to make local search available with manual address inputs; but without freely available lat/long, no one has really fired a shot yet… except Nokia. In a neither here nor there purgatory position, some suggest they are confused over which camp they live in, evident by their distancing dance from the stodgy telecom world, while simultaneously trend-following some sort of hip mobile ‘2.0 something’. This suggests that even the best in their business are struggling with identity as Telecom and Internet forces collide on the ‘commputing’ battlefield. But, with so many application areas to tackle in commputing, why are so many (including Nokia) fixated on mobile local search? With 2 billion sets of connected eyeballs out there, that equates to a lot of ad cash. Lots of folks want that cash, which has historically gone to those who owned yellow & white pages print (yep, that would be the Telecom companies). Add to this a Telecom-world acceptance that ad-subsidized services as the way forward for mobile data consumer services in general, and someone (ah hem, the carriers) just got quite concerned that the Web guys are good at what they do. Mix in a handset provider bystander perspective to these dynamics in motion, and well, we now have a three way battle. This is going to get uglier…

BusinessWeek has a review on the current state of mobile business models with insight into challenges ahead as Telecom, the Web, and Media industries violently collide and converge with Mobility at the nexus of the struggle. Add to this the emergence of other connected, location-aware consumer electronic devices beyond mobile phones, and there is larger ecosystem time bomb ticking, with developers, content providers, and businesses looking to go mobile faster and through direct means. In the Mobility era, what hurdles stifle the innovation found on the open Web specific to Location? What catalysts push the innovation envelope leading towards a more open mobile Web where creativity and options abound? It’s difficult to know these answers given the ecosystem lane-changing currently occurring, but I hope we are thinking about these issues and powers at work as they will inevitably impact the geospatial/GIS industry given the tight-coupling of Location to Mobility.

The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer aired a story tonight on LBS, covering topics such as privacy. One interesting comparison was drawn between applications that use the mobile network to ping devices in a server-server transaction scenario which is often interpreted as invasive technology vs. other handset-based applications that publish location to servers where information is then distributed to web pages and other devices. The later is more prone to hacks I agree, but user identity with these is often abstracted through aliasing and users must initiate to publish so it’s not at all invasive. With GPS in more and more devices these days, I wonder if the future of location data access will increasingly become available independent of carriers…