Despite the disruptions caused by the volcano eruptions in Iceland 2 weeks ago, approximately 140 attendees from across the LBS ecosystem made it to Amsterdam for the Location Business Summit April 28^th and 29^th, including over 40 senior-level presenters from T-Mobile, Orange FT, Vodafone, Intel, Qualcomm, Ogilvy, BBC, Dell Computers, Google, Yahoo!, Nokia and others.

Depending on your perspective, I am fortunate to attend many conferences across many industry verticals.  I have to say that the ACG Rocky Mountain Conference I attended on March 17 and 18 was the highest quality business conference I have attended in a very long time.  It deserves this recognition not only because of the quality of the speakers and the topics discussed, but perhaps more importantly the dedication of the volunteer organization and conference committee to develop a thoughtful agenda and work with the speakers, moderators, and panel members to deliver a relevant and

Still doesn’t roll off the tongue – but “AR” and “Business Applications” have a destiny that seems a natural evolution of the “Location Based X” (LBx) environment.  It almost seems like cheating – the ability to correlate information, helpful hints, creative insight, based on where you are and what you are looking at.  Mobile access to all the information you need, the view finder is the new browser, interacting in the thin green line between reality and the virtual world. 

So I’ve long been interested in all the alternative positioning systems people are working on these days… it seems that if it emits a signal, someone has tried to triangulate off of it to determine position. While GPS is by far the most popular system going (second only to the ‘hey yo where are you?”),  it has some huge drawbacks like the inability to get a position fix indoors where people spend an enormous percentage of their lives.

While Google may get the award for the most continuous streams of location related announcements.  Apple may be shaping up to win the award for some of the most interesting and impactful ones. What Apple lacks in quantity they may make up for in quality.

If you follow mobile, or marketing very closely you’ve probably seen the press or even used Location Based Social Networking (LBSN) aka Geosocial Networking applications. Over the past years there have been a ton of them popping up, with folks like Socialight and Loopt as some of the first.

There are so many companies popping up these days, looking to dig out a niche for themselves in the mobile location aware space. Here is a samplers platter of a few that I think may be the more interesting ones to keep an eye on, what they do and why they’re potentially interesting. This is by no means a recommendation, and they all have competitors doing similar things also worth checking out, but it may just help to get your creative marketing  juices flowing:

A thought to get this started: The way Google analyzes links online is really just a mass analysis of human opinions. The analysis of links offline, using mass amount of mobile device location data is the mass analysis of human actions.  What people say and what they do can be entirely different things.

This is a test blog entry.