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.

First of all many thanks to the folks who run the show around here for letting me use this space to write about stuff happening in the world where advertising and marketing meet location. I happen to think that there are a lot of interesting things already happening in this space, and what we’re seeing is only the tip of the iceberg, but hey I could be wrong, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time THAT happened!