Navtrak penned press today highlighting a little known IRS tax deduction rule for technology purchases up to $112K. 

Specifically, IRS Section 179 allows a sole proprietor, partnership or corporation to fully expense tangible property in the year it is purchased. And tax-law changes over the past few years have made this option much more appealing by dramatically increasing the amount that can be written off immediately (up to $112,000).

While written for any technology purchase deduction, Navtrak crafted additional language to support a mobile workforce management and tracking application package offering to SMBs.  Shout outs to John Page.

The last question of this morning's Garmin earnings call set the record straight with a priceless answer.  "You can call it fear, you can call it strategy.  We think our planned acquisition of Tele Atlas is inline with our corporate strategy."  Following that remark, Garmin, like Nokia-NAVTEQ before them, and TomTom-TA before them, again said the same thing - "the acquisition will not impact the open market conditions of supply to those who use our map data."  If that's true, then why does Garmin feel pressured to step up and counter TomTom's bid?!

The SiRF Location 2.0 Summit last week deserves additional mention. It was a well-organized set of panels high in content and low in company marketing spin. One of the big macro themes of the conference was defining measurable benchmarks or challenges that need to be cleared for the broader LBS space to finally reach it's true potential. One area of discussion involved the key challenges still confronting LBS developers today. I wanted to throw out my top 4 list.

(1) Privacy. This is still one of the first hurdles to offering any location-aware service. Everyone knows it but few have it right. It will continue to be an point of strong focus after recent social networking child safety press. I would not be surprised if the majority of proposed LBS apps today are blocked from launch by carrier legal departments (for good reason). As an industry and in partnership, acceptable location privacy standards must be defined, supported and embedded in location access technologies. The CTIA and other wireless leadership groups are working through best practices; it remains to be seen how quickly carriers and vendors adopt these recommended policies.

(2) Location Cost. This continues to be a significant challenge to the launch of high frequency location-aware applications. The easy out is to claim the carrier's are charging too much for access to location information. The likely answer is more complex than that. I believe one of the largest reasons location is so costly today is initial location deployments were motivated by E911 requirements, bringing along a cost structure and complexity of implementation that is not required for the majority of commercial LBS apps. Hopefully, with the growing movement towards user plane and IP location solutions, location information will approach the ubiquity and cost of current DNS services. To date, mobile carriers have selected the same vendor to provide both emergency and commercial LBS infrastructure in general. Carriers separating the procurement of emergency and commercial location is one option that could reduce the cost of commercial location information.

(3) Mobile Device Fragmentation. Anyone that has built a mobile app has struggled to develop for and QA multiple handset form factors, seemingly random J2ME implementation bugs, and the challenges of getting users to download a mobile app. Some carrier environments are better than others (i.e. BREW), however the vast majority of handsets today present extreme challenges for an end user interested in paying for, downloading and running any new app. As a developer, it is a struggle to address a large customer base given the fragmentation of devices by carrier, network technology, vendor, mobile OS, etc. These challenges alone can explain the difference in $ market size of the PC software vs. mobile software industries. This is not a location specific challenge, but the device barrier is multiplied again by the varying levels of location API support from device to device, and carrier to carrier. This will not get better until carriers and device OEMs adopt more consistent and stringent requirements for mobile app runtimes and location API support. Nokia, Apple, soon Google, other smartphone vendors and (the hope of) mobile Linux appear to be targeting simplifying development across their mobile platforms. However, it will take some time to filter down to feature phones, and will continue to be a significant barrier to the broader adoption of LBS apps (or any mobile apps for that matter).

(4) Location Accuracy & Availability. Different location apps require different levels of location accuracy. The prevalence and availability of high accuracy A-GPS has clearly motivated strong interest in navigation services of late. However, there is a wide range of location accuracy when considering A-GPS to Cell-ID. For example, mobile social networking in general can make due with block level location accuracy (intersection of streets, in-between Cell-ID and A-GPS). Many social uses of location are also challenged due to weak GPS signal reception in urban or indoor areas. Availability of different levels of location granularity (and hopefully at different costs) would be a big boon to LBS developers. It is unclear how this will evolve since some of the strongest proponents of mobile LBS are directly vested in deploying A-GPS. LBS developers will need the support of both carriers and vendors to provide a broader set of location accuracies and to ensure availability across all environments.

There are obviously more challenges that the mobile LBS industry is facing. Working to solve these 4 would be a great start.

The WSJ is reporting we'll see the Google phone [by HTC or LG], OS, or whatever the special secret is in about two weeks, with hints that TMo may be the first US carrier to open its airwaves for the offering in the middle of 2008.  If any of the previous rumors are true about the Linux-Java developer-friendly combo coupled with GPS and other optics/sensors, LBS developers (sub required) may soon roll up their sleeves and get their coding hands on what may likely become the grail of consumer-grade mobile platforms.  We'll see...       

Yourstreet.com is yet another hyperlocal service that geocodes neighborhood-level conversations, news, and whatever topics de jure your hood is most interested in.  I once thought these user-based geopublishing services would do quite well, but the histories of insiderpages and Judy's Book suggest it's a tough space to gain traction in.  Now, if these services had a Globe interface for publishing, and if the published content could somehow be consumed on a P-Nav device, that might increase the adoption rate and value enough to entice local advertisers to buy in.    

-TechCrunch

GPS Sports new SPI Elite wearable GPS device allows trainers and coaches to remotely monitor athlete movements and physical vital signs during games or practice exertions.  Beyond the ability to capture typical sporting metrics like speed, distances run, etc, the device also senses and captures bodily impacts through the devices embedded gyro accelerometer sensor.      

-c|net Sports Tech

Michael Jones' keynote presentation at SiRF's inaugural Location 2.0 Summit this past Tuesday at CTIA introduced the LBS audience to a larger world of spatial data created by users with local knowledge, suggesting "it's the guy who lives there who knows more, not the guy in a Tele Atlas van". To reinforce his point, Jones demonstrated Google Earth’s use by the US Holocaust Museum to document the genocidal crisis in Darfur, which subsequently sparked a rally of humanitarian aid and due attention for the region.

The power of user based publishing is unprecedented and can indeed inspire rapid change, but these democratized tools and means of production and distribution can also harm - check out this Guardian clip of the al-Aqsa rocket brigade using Google Earth to target Israeli villages with missiles.

John Battelle's Web 2.0 Summit interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg offers up some impressive vision into the future of Facebook's aim to map the social graphs of its users, and subsequenty expose the data through a developer API.  Will the graph represent social network DNA through space abstractions, or the physical locations and interrelationships of people on/in the social network? 

With the LBS market developing now at lightning speed, I've decided to keep a running tally of Location-Based Services M&A transactions, and those close to LBS that might impact market developments.  Here's the first 70+, starting way back in 1999 when a walled-garden AOL bought Mapquest, making it the worlds first $1B dollar mapping company.  

Today is the first date we've seen red readership pushpins on all continents across the globe.  Thanks for reading and let us know if we can offer more coverage on mobility and LBS topics-of-interest in your region.