Users of a handful of LBS apps on Alltel's deck now have the same freedoms of autonomous GPS and can use their apps outside of Alltel coverage areas, or anywhere there's other CDMA coverage covered by an Alltel roaming agreement.  Roaming has always been a big problem for LBS based on an SS7 circuit-switched architecture, but with GPS in devices, the smarts now extend to the edge of the network rendering it irrelevant other than to serve as an Internet-connection utility to connect back to a GPS aiding server/service and enable a quicker client fix.  ...And even these servers/services no longer need to be in-network elements.  I'd argue they should be sold as IT products, with IT-like simple annual licensing.  Or, if that resistance continues, use NASA A-GPS services.   

NXP had a mind-blowing demo of RFID at work, more specifically Near-Field Communications demos at MWC this week. Thus far, the majority of use cases I’ve encountered highlight goods purchases & transactions—the proverbial use my mobile to purchase a can of cola from a vending machine—you know, the “imagine walking by a Starbucks” kind of scenario that makes experienced and knowledgeable skin crawl. No folks, this stuff wasn’t that stuff, it was good. Here’s the gist of it…

Your day starts as you enter the tube station (in this case we were using the demo to pretend we were in London). On the wall is a printed tube map (which of course was in the demo kiosk at NXPs booth and of course are everywhere in the London Underground). Each tube station on the map contains an imbedded RFID tag within the seams of the material used for printing. The device used for the demo served as an NFC read/write scanner (it was a Nokia 6131), and when placed over the printed map and on a tube station destination, a simple application deducted £4.95 from my topped up £21.90 bank balance which I accessed online, and transferred to my mobile debit account.  Sure, the wireless wallet thing was hard at work here, but it got better as I then saw this used for expense reporting, secure building access, and geofencing alert notifications & automated updates based on room access entry...  In the end, I wondered if I could have accomplished this all online without the need to touch physical real-world objects, and while certainly some transactions could have occurred, NFC and RFID introduced a real-world interactivity that added a geographic context beyond virtual application.  ...The enterprise & business mobility opportunities are limitless.  

There were four Android demos onsite in Barcelona this week. The three I saw at Marvell, Texas Instruments, and Qualcomm booths weren’t enough to convince me that the industry is on the verge of a disruptive paradigm shift a la Android, but rather that single-chip promises powering Android will indeed introduce disruptive motions; of course though, what I saw of Android itself wasn’t much beyond what Google shared back in November.

Marvell, Qualcomm, and TI were all demonstrating identical Android capabilities, apparently at Google’s request for non-differentiation - according to Sy Choudhury, a sharp PM from Qualcomm.  These capabilities included Browsing, OpenGL, etc. And all demos combined single-chip features such as GPS, broadband connectivity, graphics acceleration, and multimedia capabilities to showcase Google applications. For me, the wow-factor was not a spinning globe care of the OpenGL demo that looked like Google Earth, but rather the packaging of the computing & communications resources and integration porting of the Android Linux stack to them. The implications suggest anyone can build an Android phone or device by simply dropping the packaged silicon solution into a casing which any one of 1800+ ODMs in Asia can do these days. …Layer on a full stack open source operating system plus APIs and extensions, and the possibilities then become quite clear. It’s difficult to see how this approach (not necessarily Andriod itself) won’t change everything and turn the mobile world upside down for those selling mobile OS platforms or designing mobile devices… I hope Google can handle the porting demand though. They could get very busy, very soon. 

Marianne Kolbasuk McGee at InformationWeek has a nice refresher piece on the always-valuable utility, but not-so-flashy side of location-based resource management within enterprise mobility solutions, citing WalMart and Papa John's ROI proofs - among others. It's a welcomed fresh breeze of B2B case study reality during a time when the daily inundation of social press stories and blogs cover tired topics of simplistic Location uses for Search, MoSoSo, and Local Advertising—naturally though, these are covered as well…

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

The local rumor mill here in Boulder County Colorado suggests a big-daddy Web company is moving to the area per the recent hush-hush sale of the old StorageTek facility that Sun Microsystems acquired in 2005.  With IT infrastructure and storage strategically important in an era of hosted Web 2.0 applications, perhaps rumors will live up to local gossip and see Google moving in.  Others are speculating that if the Microhoo thing goes through, someone should have use for all those Sun boxes hidden inside the large facility shown below.  Either or neither, this is good news for Boulder.

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