Apple has an open requisition out for a software engineer to work on the "Maps team".  According to the req:

A month after employees leaked a story that AOL would begin trimming back staff at MapQuest in an attempt to "realign" the direction of the Denver-based online mapping provider, I discovered today that Jim Griener, the former GM, has moved on to begin his own mobile content sharing and social networking start-up called RockeTalk.  Christian Dwyer succeeds Jim as MapQuest's new GM.  Given Christian's background with the B2B and enterprise side of MapQuest's market development activities and sales efforts, could it be the AOL mothership has made these moves as part of a plan to dump the Web and Mobile consumer mapping efforts it once prided itself upon?       

Dominique Bonte at ABI says we can expect to see huge increases in revenues from Carriers purchasing LBS infrastructure upgrades, namely around OMA-SUPL standards-compliant platforms that leverage GPS chipset commodities in handsets. The specific number is $2.2B by 2013. Dominique's work in the area of Outdoor GPS is conservative and therefore what I consider honest and good, so I respect what he has to say, but I'm having a hard time swallowing this pill.

The first wave of Carrier LBS infrastructure deployments lasted about 3 years between 1999 and 2001, and after that brief time when MPCs and GMLCs were purchased as standalone pieces of monolithic SS7 equipment, larger infrastructure players such as Ericsson and Nokia started giving the stuff away with network upgrades, destroying business models overnight for those focused on selling standalone LBS gear. Today, everything is IP-based with SUPL, and that means no more fork lifting redundancies of monstrous, expensive, fault-tolerant servers, but rather installing IT-grade inexpensive racks that handle TCP/IP and SIP traffic. The software that runs on it is equally IT-grade and should only command the same inexpensive price tag for a carrier. Compound this with the arrival of Google's Cell-ID offering beyond the command & control of wireless networks, further reducing the value of this once carrier-only information asset, and I wonder... who will pony-up the projected billions to pay infrastructure providers for what is now a commodity?

Despite being the most popular and successful North American LBS application to date, generating a significant percentage of total LBS revenues, other opportunities exist beyond navigation, namely with location-enriched communications that leverage the inherent immediacy and presence power of the mobile network. T-Mobile US understands this...

While GPS enables traffic and navigation services, the core of the T-Mobile brand is about connecting our customers to the people who matter most.

TMo wants to

define and create experiences that enhance personal relationships and enrich all forms of personal communications, while also contributing to the value proposition of My Faves.

With the iPhone and Android there's a lot of focus now on location as an autonomous function and capability of the device, rendering the network to an irrelevant bit-pipe that has no role in the L part of LBS. That's certainly true for local search, navigation, publishing, and other device-centric Web applications, but TMo evidently knows that SIP-based immediacy in the network can be used in a way to add the "L" relevance back into the mix. Well done on them and werd up to my homey Tim Dunn.

1. TrailRunner
2. PublicEarth
3. G-Park
4. meetnowlive
5. wenear