It's almost a decade ago now that the 2002 film Minority Report showed the moral majority what the future will look like in 2054 when mobility, geo-location and targeted content technologies merge. While the movie looks at various elements of the digital future, the biggest 'ah ha' moment for both privacy advocates and marketers alike happens when John Anderton (Tom Cruise) has his retinas scanned as he exists the train and a digital billboard displays "John Anderton, you could use a Guinness right now."

So how long until you walk past a store and it offers the "other people like/bought" experience outside of the confines of a website? Services like AT&T's Shop Alerts show promise by linking customers proximity to stores and offers. But these aren't the "other people like you" recommendations based on behavior that go beyond the proximity to a store you already like (and have already subscribed to).

Another service that brings us closer to beverage recommendations is the goHow application developed by Denver airport. Described as "blending real-time travel information with precisely targeted marketing messages," it targets travelers with relevant offers based on their locations such as departure gates, as well as their likely needs based on events. Your flight is delayed? You could use a Guinness right now. There is a bar around the corner and a restaurant near gate four.

However, as innovative as both of these technologies are, they rely on voluntary subscriptions and locations. What if you haven't subscribed to your carrier's service, or aren't at Denver Airport? Well, your friendly social platform is already building out the data that could soon understand when you'd like a Guinness.

Adrian Lewis from on the community weblog MetaFilter said that "if you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold," referring of course to the value of the data that folks like Facebook are amassing. Facebook doesn't just know what sort of trivia my old school friends and I like to play - it knows the brands I like and often where I am.

Looking at my own Facebook and Twitter pages, if Smith & Wollensky in New York had a party of six just cancel their reservation, and knew that five of my colleagues and I were at an industry event around the corner, the combination of these data points (my location, my likes, what I'm doing and at what time of day) could allow them to create an offer that brings them a customer immediately.

One consideration is the time of day - a crucial element in the real world, unlike in the online world where it's essentially irrelevant. My recommendations on Amazon are the same while I'm at the office at 1:00pm as they are at 3:00am while I'm in my pajamas. Smith & Wollensky however, is closed at 3:00am. They have an empty table at 9:00pm and a very narrow window to get revenue from it. If they want to be relevant to the mobile consumer, the time of day a potential customer walks past their restaurant is imperative.

While most of today's technology relies on the consumer explicitly stating their likes and locations, micropayments are becoming more prevalent, and they're eliminating the need for the consumer to identify themselves. Make a payment with your phone and it knows that you like Starbucks, when you like to drink coffee and the specific location you frequent.

What if the consumer doesn't make a purchase? CNN Money recently reported that malls are already implementing technology that anonymously tracks shoppers' cell phones to determine the path they take between stores. As the article points out, this technology applies techniques of the online world to gain insight into people that don't make traceable transactions.

There is of course, a social element to data gathering and it can be seen in two ways. Firstly, the data is sometimes used as only a conversation starter so you can be sold a product by a human. I used to have the pay-per-view soccer channel in the UK, and I would often get a call from "a fellow Chelsea fan" who would talk about my team and tell me that I should sign up for Chelsea TV. There are other times when social media and the "gamification" of services that basically harvest data for marketing applications are so influential that we volunteer all the information in exchange for a virtual badge or to be crowned mayor of our favorite restaurant.

While privacy advocates may be concerned about large-scale information gather, the general public doesn't seem to mind. We are all surrendering privacy in exchange for convenience, credibility, badges or to be social. Who doesn't dream about an assistant who knows your coffee preference, a barman who recalls your favorite beer, or a Maître D who knows your favorite table?

One could argue that the launch of Apple's Siri isn't just about talking to your iPhone and establishing a verbal relationship with your mobile device. It may be that your phone will soon be making suggestions such as enjoying a pint of Guinness after a run from the authorities. Perhaps it will be more subtle than that. Maybe we won't have billboards using our names and favorite brands as we walk past as envisaged by Minority Report. Perhaps our little pocket assistant will whisper wirelessly as we walk into a strange town bar and the barman will say, "you could use a Guinness right now."

Geofencing is a term typically used to refer to the drawing of a line on a map where some kind of pre-determined action is triggered, it's most established in the business of transporting goods in trucks and triggering tracking actions when those trucks enter into certain geographic zones. Flickr's new privacy geofences are something everyone is likely to enjoy using though. I, for example, have already set up a geofence around my house prohibiting anyone but my approved contacts from seeing the photos I upload from home. Thanks, Flickr! Update: Turns out I got that wrong, the photos are subject to my previous privacy setting - it's just the location of my house that's now more private due to the geofence. That's cool too!

The Flickr implementation of this feature lets you search for a spot on a map, then determine how big the area you want to refer to is, set the particular privacy setting for that zone apart from your account-wide default setting, then name the geofenced area. You can then choose whether or not to apply this new privacy setting to all the photos you've uploaded from that location in the past. Update: As commenters graciously pointed out, I misunderstood this announcement a bit - it's actually the location of the photo that is subjected to a new privacy setting, not the photo itself. Good to know, effect is similar but a little different. I thought this was like Google Plus or Facebook privacy settings - it turns out it's not quite the same.

Flickr says it has 300 million geotagged photos uploaded to its databases already. This is the kind of feature that could really help more people feel comfortable geotagging their photos. Facebook really ought to enable this feature as well.

Right: Where did I eat this wonderful dinner of grilled asparagus with shallot pepper and salmon? None of your business, unless you're a member of my friends and family group!

Heck, Twitter and everyone else ought to do this. I don't geotag my Tweets because so many of them are posted from home and my exact address gets transmitted to all my followers. Dear Twitter, would you please set up a feature like this and let me draw circles within which I would like my location obscured to the neighborhood level? Please? Almost two years since launching, Twitter's location feature has been a big disappointment relative to its potential and I can't help but think that the lack of clear controls for users is a big part of that.

There was a time when concepts like this might have felt super-geeky, or not of general interest to a lot of people. With the rise of smartphones and the growing sophistication of users, I think that time may well have passed.

You can visit this page on Flickr to try setting up some geofences for yourself. The official announcement just went up here.

The petition was launched by John Tanza Mabusu, a South Sudanese man living in Washington, DC. He writes, "As it is now, the world map looks like nothing happened on July 9th, 2011, and the map of Sudan looks like the country is still one... if South Sudan was in the Europe or North America, it would be appearing on the world map by now!"

No word from Google on Sudan

In an email, a Google spokesperson confirmed that the change to Martyr's Square was submitted via Google Map Maker, the participatory tool for editing Google Maps. Map Maker edits are moderated, and this change was quickly approved and pushed to the live map. "We're committed to providing our users with the richest, most up-to-date maps possible," the spokesperson wrote, "and as part of that effort we continuously explore ways to integrate new information into Google Maps." Google has yet to respond with comment to questions about South Sudan.

Bing is working on it

Update 8/24 11:45 a.m.: A Microsoft spokesperson says that an update to Bing Maps adding South Sudan is in the works and may be accelerated. "Our next imagery update is slated to happen in the coming months; however, we are currently working on a solution to ensure users are able to locate South Sudan on Bing Maps in the interim. This temporary fix will roll out next month."

Did you mean: Sudan

A search for South Sudan on Google Maps returns the message "Did you mean: Sudan." A search for "South Sudan" on Bing Maps returns a location result for coordinates in the middle of central Niger almost 2,500 miles away from South Sudan's capital of Juba. Yahoo Maps, inexplicably, returns an address near Augusta, Georgia, USA. And National Geographic, whose website uses Bing maps, has simply added a disclaimer to their maps pages, which reads: "Boundaries and names shown do not necessarily reflect the map policy of the National Geographic Society."

We've reached out to Yahoo for comment on this policy, and we'll update the post with any responses.

You can find the petition here.

How do you feel about these map policies? Sound off in the comments.

More accurately, they have reversed the name. Renamed "Green Square" by Libyan dictator Moamar Qaddafi, it now shows up on Google Maps under its old name, Martyr's Square.

Martyr's Square was the name of the square in Tripoli before Gaddafi regime renamed it. Google says the name change was made by a user late Sunday night, as rebel forces took over the city. It was approved by Google, meaning it was visible to the public, shortly thereafter.

Google says the square's name has been re-labeled Martyr's Square, though map users can continue to search using either name to find the location.

Google uses a broad range of sources to keep its maps up to date. This includes public and commercial data providers as well as user contributions.

A user made the change late on Sunday, just as rebel forces rolled into Tripoli. You can search for the square under either name but on the map the square is labeled with its original name.

Names are important. They inspire. They amplify ideals. It's a little change, but it's big.

Today at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco, Google announced the opening up and general availability of the Google Places API.

The API, which has been in a closed beta testing and only available for a select number of companies for the past year, gives developers access to Google's database of restaurants, bars, hotels and various other points of interest.

The Places API was first introduced at Google I/O last year and has been in use by a number of companies, including location-based app SCVNGR. Over the past year, the company has tested the service and added a number of new features:

• A globally consistent type scheme for Places, spanning more than 100 types such as bar, restaurant, and lodging
• Name and type based query support
• A significantly simpler key based authentication scheme
• Global coverage across every country covered by Google Maps
• Google APIs Console integration, which provides group ownership of projects, key management, and usage monitoring
• Instant reflection of new Places submitted by an app in subsequent searches made by that app, with new Places shared with all apps after moderation
• Real time reranking of search results based on current check-in activity, so that Places that are currently popular are automatically ranked higher in searches by your app

Also included in the newly released API is an autocomplete service, much as users have become used to seeing when searching on Google. The service predicts place results as a user types, meaning that if they are looking for a familiar bar and know the name, they may only need to type a few letters before seeing the result, which can be ultimately helpful on a mobile device.

We asked Mitchell if the API would quickly connect developers to other Google data, such as open hours or Street View imagery and he said that it isn't quite there yet, but it is certainly going in that direction.

For developers and interested parties attending Google I/O, there is a session - "Building Location Based apps using Google APIs" - at 3pm on Wednesday, in which Marcelo Camelo will provide more detail.

This rescue was possible only due to the use of disruptive, community-driven Web 2.0 technology by volunteer and technical communities (VTCs) working on disaster and conflict management. VTCs such as OpenStreetMap, CrisisMappers, Crisis Commons, Sahana and Ushahidi have contributed greatly to disaster management. VTCs have used SMS, social media and satellite imagery; built communities around humanitarian efforts; and created technology tools and wikis, using open source software, hardware and platforms, as well as free cloud based services in affected countries such as Haiti, Libya and Japan.

Despite their successes, it has not been an easy ride.

VTCs continue to face major challenges, such as language and coordination. Many disasters occur in countries that are not English speaking, while much of the volunteer community is Angolophone. Coordination can be a problem too. Established development organizations such as the UN have been dealing with crises for many years and have a rich knowledge base, but are also challenged by data silos, proprietary systems and bureaucracy. VTCs are more agile and technically adept, but can be uncoordinated.

Disaster Relief 2.0: The Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies, a report produced by the UN and partner organizations, examines these issues in detail. It identified a host of additional challenges facing VTCs

1. The need to build a reputation for reliability, trust, professionalism
2. Lack of resources
3. The technical challenges of geolocation with partial information and verifying accuracy of reports
4. Building local capacity to manage disaster and conflict situations

Despite these challenges the VTCs will play an increasingly important role in the future disaster management, thanks a to a growing number of volunteers and the power of Web 2.0 technologies.

So, what's next?

Geolocation

We may see better methods of locating people during an emergency. Perhaps a Foursquare type check-in, or even better, an automatic check-in technology, where you don't have to press a button to enter where you are, could be included in low-cost cell phones.

It is true that this presents privacy concerns. However this may be a bigger issue in the West. For example, the Singapore constitution does not contain any explicit right to privacy. In countries where privacy is not a cultural norm or expectation, geolocation software installed on the cheapest phones could provide enormous help during disaster relief efforts.

The countries with the highest number of people affected by disasters in 2010 include China, Pakistan and Thailand. These are countries where privacy protections are low, and where privacy is not a strong cultural value. They also score low on "individualism" in a framework developed by Greet Hofstede as a way to evaluate a country's culture.

If we are to postulate that a lower score in individualism for a country also indicates that its people place a low importance on privacy, then it seems plausible that some disaster-prone countries could implement geolocation on cell phones without violating societal norms and save thousands, if not millions of lives.

Mapping

A recent trend in VTC disaster management has been to use social media data as a layer on crisis maps. For example, a Hypercities project maps live Twitter messages on a map of Egypt, showing the location and picture of the Twitterer. This is helpful but some of the messages are clearly not relevant to crisis mapping. The challenge in using social media as a crisis map layer is that the data is huge, chaotic, free, and collectively good, but individually unreliable. To improve the social media data for inclusion on crisis maps, we need to focus on quality and relevance.

To determine quality in a Twitter stream, we can assume that source-quality equals information-quality. To identify quality sources for a given topic, we could use Twitter sources via curated lists from Listorious or established news media outlets and non-profits like Ushahidi. For instance Listorious has a list of reputable sources for the Haiti Earthquake curated by The New York Times.

To further refine the source-quality measure, we could also look at the number of followers of sources and the number of retweets that contain a relevant hashtag. For example, a tweet containing #civ2010 #IvoryCoast #civsocial #ict4d about the Abidjan crowd-sourced crisis map:http://is.gd/7IUkix was retweeted extensively in April.

We can assume that when we get higher quality tweets, the tweets are more relevant. Once the parameters for source and content quality are set, a program could read the Twitter stream and filter the quality tweets based on the selected parameters. In addition to improving the quality and relevance of the social media layer of crisis maps, perhaps we could also focus on improving the quality of the sources of the crisis map, through crowd sourcing methods such as incorporating Google's +1 or a like-type function on information contained in the collaborative disaster maps.

Finally, improved matching between people needing assistance in a disaster and those who can help would add value. A service could be set up to match people affected by natural disaster with those who have the funds, goods, time or know-how to assist them. For example, Kiva partners entrepreneurs with lenders via existing microfinance institutions that facilitate the loans. DonorsChoose.org matches American public school teachers who need classroom supplies with "microdonors."

This kind of a matching service could be set up for organizations, groups, individuals and families affected by natural disasters. Some of the elements that would include skills, available time, specialty, needs (goods and services) and urgency.

The future of Web 2.0, social media and their applications are as unpredictable as the people they connect. But from what we have seen and and what we can reasonably postulate,  it is clear that these technologies have a profound positive impact in disaster management. I am sure the best is yet to come.

Photo by connor212

This is the 7th year that we've chosen a Most Promising company. Looking back at our results, we've hit the mark sometimes: for example, Feedburner in 2004 and Digg in 2005. Other times our picks have been accurate on the trends, but flew wide of the dartboard when it came to picking the successful companies. We chose sync app Sharpcast (now SugarSync) in 2006, but DropBox is better known now. We chose Brightkite in 2008, which ultimately lost out to Foursquare in the battle of the check-in apps. However, we think we have a winner here in SimpleGeo!

Location has been a big trend of 2010. Foursquare, Facebook, Google and others have developed successful products using location data. The idea behind SimpleGeo is to be a platform for others to utilize location data.

Back in February, before SimpleGeo had launched, the company claimed to be indexing more than 1 million location-based objects every hour.

Although we think SimpleGeo has a lot of potential, we should note that geolocation is a very crowded field. As Marshall Kirkpatrick explained last month, SimpleGeo is competing in some way with entrenched enterprise geodata megaliths like Esri; slow-baked open source standards-based technologies such as OpenGeo; hip startups like Locationlabs, Factual and Foursquare; BigCos like Facebook and Google; and free open-source geodata backed by big mapping companies.

As a sign of things to come, earlier this month SimpleGeo launched into public beta two free application programming interfaces (APIs) that offer a large amount of information about 13 million places in the United States. This information will be available for free, forever, to anyone building an application that needs local context.

Let us know in the comments if you agree with our choice for Most Promising company for 2011, or whether you think another company should've been selected.

It's likely that Foursquare is looking for someone to turn its massive datasets culled from all those check-ins into something useful and, of course, monetizable.

Alistair Goodman wrote at Business Insider that he expects Facebook Places to win the check-in wars, but:

Mark Andreesen, an investor in Foursquare and board member of Facebook, will most likely still lead Foursquare into new areas that won't be touched by Facebook with the hopes of helping it pivot beyond the check-in. Gowalla won't be so lucky.

Getting into big data in a big way would be one way for Foursquare to build value and keep from becoming just another check-in service. As we've noted before, it won't have a whole lot of competition in the food recommendation space.

Marshall noted that, in addition to a recommendation engine, Foursquare has talked about incentivizing behavior:

In addition to recommendations, the company has long talked about incentivization of real-world behavior. Today, for example, Foursquare announced a partnership with CNN, which will give a "healthy eater" badge to anyone who checks-in at one of ten thousand farmers markets. It's unclear whether a dorky apple badge with CNN emblazoned on it is going to incentivize anyone to do anything - but it's a start and an interesting idea.

Imagine checking in at a farmer's market, then later receiving recommendations to restaurants that cook with locally-sourced food when you check-in nearby. It's got to be just a matter of time before big companies like McDonald's start incentivizing fun and Happy Meals lest we all get too many farmers market recommendations.

We've asked before what value there may be in the massive datasets generated by geotracking. If anyone can think of some novel uses for this data, please let us know in the comments (or found a start-up).

Interested in applying for the job? Here's are Foursquare's requirements:

• MS or PhD in CS/Machine Learning or Statistics or a BS with extensive experience in the field
• 5+ years experience as a data scientist/analyst on large datasets, or research in this area
• Ability to work with big datasets with minimal engineering support
• Comfortable in a small, intense and high-growth start-up environment

If you want to learn more about data science, you might want to check out the free e-book Mining of Massive Datasets from Stanford professors Anand Rajaraman and Jeffrey Ullman.

The WikiLeaks saga of the last two weeks has been illustrative, if nothing else, of the importance of the decentralization of the Internet in relation to the freedom of information. An attempt to stifle a voice in one location simply leads to that voice springing from another, like a leak from a rusted pipe or a Whac-A-Mole arcade game. 

WikiLeaks currently has well over 1,000 mirrors, which host the same data in different locations in case the parent site is taken down, and one Harvard developer has gathered all of these mirrors into a Google Earth visualization to show from whence these leaks have sprung. 

In order to create the visualization, Laurence Muller wrote a PHP script to scrape the primary list of WikiLeaks mirrors on the WikiLeaks site. He found 1,334 URLs and used GeoLite City to resolve each of them to a relatively specific (city-wide) geospatial location. Finally, he converted the list of related URLs, IP addresses and longitude/latitude coordinates into KML format for use with Google Earth. The result is a series of pins on a 3D globe showing all of the locations, globally, where WikiLeaks data is being mirrored.

Taking a quick look at the data, you can see that many of the mirrors are located throughout Europe, though they can be found as far and wide as South America, North America, Asia and Africa. They are  all over the globe.

Earlier this week, Marshall Kirkpatrick took a similar look at how WikiLeaks' data spread though decentralized, peer-to-peer networks, such as on the bittorrent site The Pirate Bay. He came up with a great bunch of stats that show just how difficult it can be to stifle the spread of information with tools like bittorent and dedicated mirror sites. This same sort of map for bittorent seeds would likely show an even greater global distribution.

If you have installed the Google Earth Plug-In you can take a look for yourself at the mapped out data. And if you're even more of a geo-location geek, Muller has made the data available for download on his blog.

SimpleGeo says it will launch "this Fall" and its goal will be "to build and index all kinds of public and private geospatial data and make access as easy as possible." We reported all the way back in February that the company was indexing more than 1 million locations per hour. That's a whole lot of data describing various places that other applications can tap into. Adelson, the company's new leader, is just 40 years old but has founded some of the most important, if little-known, tech companies in the last 15 years.

"Jay founded Equinix, a billion dollar international company that operates data centers and provides network connectivity services for companies around the world. Currently, well over 70% of the world's Internet traffic depends on Equinix to reach its destination. He also co-founded Digital Equipment Corporation's Palo Alto Internet Exchange (PAIX), one of the largest Internet aggregation points in the United States. Before that, Jay was a founding employee of Netcom, one of the nation's first ISPs."

Galligan, who sold a social stream aggregator called SocialThing to AOL in 2008, co-founded SimpleGeo with former Digg Chief Architect Joe Stump. The two originally called the endeavor CrashCorp and began building an augmented reality mobile gaming company.

ReadWriteWeb's Chris Cameron explained the duo's radical pivot in a profile this spring:

"Their original plan was create mobile games using augmented reality, but they soon learned that the hardest part was developing the back-end geolocation infrastructure that would support their applications.

The company that plays the most central role in providing geodata to the fast-growing world of Web and mobile apps and startups will be the provider of the lens through which users (and developers) see a whole new dimension of computing, if not lived experience of the world around us...

If you'll indulge me in a little Allegory of the Cave talk: the geodata these companies are compiling describes qualities of physical places that we haven't previously been able to see, on-site or remotely. They make demographics and social trends, commerce and politics, culture and history visible, tied to specific places and accessible through the mobile devices we carry in our pockets.

It was at this point that Galligan and Stump saw an opportunity, quickly changed directions and created SimpleGeo. Instead of jumping in the with the masses of application developers using augmented reality to wow smartphone users, the pair instead focused on serving the needs of the developers themselves, creating a 'geodata in a box' service."

The company has now raised nearly $10 million in venture capital. It has received an incredible amount of attention in the startup-focused press, thanks largely to the backgrounds and dynamic personalities of its founders - but also because of the scope of its ambition and the exciting potential represented by its goals.

"To say that this has been a blistering fast ride would be a massive understatement," Galligan said in a blog post about his decision to give up his CEO position. "The pace of innovation in the geolocation industry as a whole, as well as at our company, has been at break-neck speed since the beginning of 2010. We've gone from four to 23 employees in nine months, built technology that, at the end of last year we were only dreaming of, and have thousands of developers using our platform."

Geo is So Hot it Hurts

Putting a heavy hitter like Adelson in charge will help bolster the ambitious company's chances in a battle against a whole lot of competition and pseudo-competition, including entrenched enterprise geodata megaliths, slow-baked open source standards-based technologies, other hip little startups, hip startups that aren't so little, Google (Google's Marissa Mayer, who was the VP of search product, is now focused entirely on local and location) and free open-source geodata backed by big mapping companies trying to make sure Google doesn't eat their lunch.

This market is so big that there are major players in it who haven't even heard of SimpleGeo, despite all the hype the company has received in the press.

In other words, it's a very crowded market.

The company that plays the most central role in providing geodata to the fast-growing world of Web and mobile apps and startups will be the provider of the lens through which users (and developers) see a whole new dimension of computing, if not lived experience of the world around us.

If you'll indulge me in a little Allegory of the Cave talk: the geodata these companies are compiling describes qualities of physical places that we haven't previously been able to see, on-site or remotely. They make demographics and social trends, commerce and politics, culture and history visible, tied to specific places and accessible through the mobile devices we carry in our pockets.

First computing became democratized, then it became social, and now it is leaving the desktop and changing the way many of us experience the places formerly known as the offline world. All of those transformations have produced tidal waves of new data, upon which new companies, user experiences and types of economy have been produced.

Will Facebook be the Facebook of Location (as it has become to identity), will a shared and open standard data format rule the day, or will a startup like SimpleGeo succeed in putting itself in the center of the coming geo-aware world?

That question becomes a little more interesting with Adelson at the helm.

Where can you learn about all this geo-creativity? Here at ReadWriteWeb, we've come up with a system for efficiently discovering a large number of the top blogs on any subject - and we track the top stories in Geolocation closely. We've decided to open up a little bit of our research and share with you our list of the Top Blogs in Geolocation This Week. Read on to find out which top 10 blogs are writing the hottest stuff now and see all 300 of the blogs we're tracking.

Here are the top 10 blogs about geolocation this week, in terms of how much buzz their articles got with readers around the web. To see the full list of 300 we're tracking (and to let us know if your geoblog isn't on the list!) please visit this page on Postrank. Big thanks to Justin Houk for helping run the machine that unearthed these blogs. Please do help us build the list out even more.

The Top Ten Geo Blogs for September 27- October 1, 2010

1. The Foursquare Blog Up from #12 last week

   The company blog of hot location based social network Foursquare made a big splash this week with posts about the new push notifications for Blackberry users and a new partnership with CNN to incentivize healthy eating through patronage of farmers' markets around the country.

   I don't know what I think of the whole CNN/Farmers' Market thing specifically, but it does feel like we're getting somewhere, doesn't it?

2. Google Maps Mania
   #2, just like last week

   This incredibly prolific blog that highlights cool uses of Google Maps products is unaffiliated with the company, but really shows what Google location technology can do. This week's big hit was a post about making animated driving directions.

   Really, go check out this blog - the amount of cool stuff it finds is amazing.

3. Google LatLong
   Down from #1 last week

   The official Google Maps and Earth team blog made a big announcement about the spread of Street View onto every continent on the planet - but it also posted news about a revamped "photos" layer on Google Maps.

   There are cooler things going on around location than Google Maps, but everyone knows about it and the product changes frequently compared to other major tools from the giant company.

4. Planet OSGeo
   Was #3 last week

   This geo community posted big hits all week long last week, but the biggest was in-depth coverage of the Free and Open Source Software for Geomatics Conference (FOSS4G) in Barcelona.

   That's some detailed, wonky stuff - but the wonks were buzzing!



5. Ogle Earth
   Boom! Was #285 last week!

   Ogle Earth spent most of this month in hiatus, but came back with a big story about the new iPhone 4 in China being shipped with censored maps onboard! See also subsequent coverage on ReadWriteWeb.

   Censored maps! Who thinks they can still get away with that these days? Not so cool that Apple went a long with it.

6. Google Earth Blog
   Last week #4

   The independent blog Google Earth: Amazing Things About Google Earth wrote two big posts this week: a report on the first episode of a new short video series about geospatial technology (see below) and a short review of a new game authoring platform for Google Earth.

7. All Points Blog Up from #21

   All Points is a must-read site and publishes a great podcast, but this week the site's biggest hit was a short post about a 2 day, multi-organization experiment in the use of social media in disaster response.

   Disaster response is one of the big areas of focus in geo - because when things turn real bad, you want to know exactly where everything is!

8. Slashgeo
   Was #7 last week

   SlashGeo is like Slashdot for all things Geo. The biggest hit this week was a news item about DataPlace.org's big database of housing and demographic data made available under an Open Source license. Hello, mashups!

9. The AnyGeo Blog - Anything Geospatial
   Holding steady at #9

   The AnyGeo aggregator's community was most responsive this week to its post about the new Sony Ericcson LiveView: a cool little device that looks like an iPod nano but is actually a rich interface for reading and writing data to and from almost any Android phone in your pocket. It's pretty awesome.
   

10. GISUser.com - The complete GIS, LBS, and Geospatial Technology Resource
    #10

    GIS newswire GISUser.com published videos of the 5 minute Ignite-style Lightning Talks from this year's user conference of ESRI, a massive geo services company. Historical GIS, augmented reality, and many other subjects are discussed in a high-energy format. I haven't watched these videos yet but I've got them all queued up on my iPhone and look forward to it.

Those were just a few of the biggest hits from the very most-buzzed-about geo blogs this week. There was so much more reported on that was super interesting. Check out this page for the full list of nearly 300 geo blogs we're tracking and their top posts this week. If you write an exciting geo blog that's not on that list, let us know!

Onward, in an era when location is an unprecedented platform for world-changing technology innovation!

Gigaom's Liz Gannes called the offering "a great place database in the sky." Adam Duvander at ProgrammableWeb said it was "a first step toward creating a place database to which anyone can contribute...extremely valuable to developers." What makes this data offering so exciting? The ability to cross-reference it with any other location data that you already have and create something new.

The write access that Factual provides offers a solution to the problem of accuracy, the company says. Gannes explains that Factual "combines data from partners, vendors and users, and applies machine learning to extract and validate facts -- for instance, to determine what the actual current phone number is for a business." (See also our review of Factual's basic offering from October.)

A mobile "what's near me" app is just the most obvious use case, though. Such data could really be put to use in enriching any existing bit of location data. The Factual data set includes fields beyond name, latitude, longitude and adress - it's also got phone numbers, whether a business delivers food, whether it serves alcohol and much more.

The Real World, Mashed Into Apps

Imagine any of those fields being cross referenced with any other location data you've got.

• Full bars with the highest Yelp rating within a quarter mile of any movie theatre.
• Family-friendly restaurants within a mile of every historic landmark in the country, for those weekend educational trips with the kids.
• 24-hour restaurants nearest any musical venue.

Every one of those mashups of location data is a Web or mobile app that people would use, aren't they? Those are just a few quick ideas.

The data set needs filling out beyond the basics; many of the fields beyond location and phone number hold sparse data right now. But the potential, the price (free), the pedigree and the programmability of this offering are all very promising.

Location as a platform, cross-referenced with place, time, people and content, could be a big part of the future of our computing experience. The first step is to get the data about what is where into as many hands as possible.

"Hopefully," Elbaz says on his very narrative LinkedIn profile, "high-quality, lower or no cost data will unleash a wave of creativity and productivity by application developers and content publishers."

Those kinds of things could really happen once a startup called Geoloqi launches soon. Geoloqi turns your mobile location into a platform for messaging, programmed functionality and temporary, limited sharing. The consumer service could make the dream of passively consuming ambient information about our surroundings a reality and the program's code is intended to enable any other developer to add location services to their applications. It's the fruit of several years of experimental location tracking and the company says it will launch publicly in the coming weeks.

Geoloqi is an open source server and client program, entirely volunteer built, nearest to completion on the iPhone but usable on any phone through the very simple Instamapper GPS app. The software is free; co-founders Aaron Parecki and Amber Case envision turning it into a business by charging for API calls or facilitating opt-in location based advertising.

For now, though, it's geeks hacking for the sake of the tech. Parecki is building the server and website, and Case is doing interface design, marketing and co-ordinating the volunteer developers who are donating their work because they think the project is exciting. Parecki and Case have invited limited beta testers into the program already and say they hope to submit the nearly-finished iPhone app to Apple in November.

You can drop a geonote for Case via this page. Just designate a city, neighborhood, area or block, enter your message, name and email adress. The program will tell you how likely she is to receive that note, based on how often she's traveled through that area in the last 30 days. If she enters the area designated, she'll get your note sent by SMS and you'll get an email letting you know it was sent.

That's because Case has opted-in to receive public geonotes. Other users will choose only to share their location temporarily with one other person (through a live tracking map that will expire after a given period of time), to just leave themselves geonotes or to subscribe to any of a menu of geonote layers uploaded through the Geoloqi API.

Those layers will be simple data sets made up of items, with a latitude, longitude and radius. They can prompt any number of command-line style actions, you can even check-in automatically to your favorite designated locations on Foursquare or Gowalla. The default layer will be a global collection of Easter Eggs.

This isn't at core about sharing your location, though, like other services are. This is about turning your location into programmable data, actionable information for automated processes, including but not at all limited to person-to-person messaging. Still, no matter how unfair it seems, the young company will have to deal with privacy concerns as they leverage persistent tracking. As an opt-in service, Geoloqi hopes to avoid that kind of concern.

Indoor location tracking and battery life are also issues, but the Geoloqi team says they are working on variable settings that help minimize their service's drain on the battery.

You know what I want? I want to think of a thing, or a type of thing - like the world's best coffee shops, fantastic vegetarian restaurants or places where news reports say that a wild baby animal has been seen. Then I want to geocode those locations, upload them to Geoloqi and subscribe to push notifications whenever I approach one of those places. And I want to subscribe to the layers of annotation that other people publish as well.

I want to be able to stand in front of a building, declare my location to an online service and find out what the person who first owned it did for a living and when the intersection I'm standing at has been in the news, ever. An ambient information service, that's what I want.

I want to be able to track my own location and to enjoy services based on it.

My fingers are crossed that Geoloqi is going to be as useful as it sounds.

The Geoloqi API will launch on October 1st and the team is co-sponsoring an Open Government hackathon, along with Seattle based cloud messaging API provider Tropo, in Portland on October 3rd.

"It's huge and it's increasing," said Michael Becker, a director at the Mobile Marketing Association. "Location is going to play an increasingly critical role in enabling successful consumer engagement through and with the mobile phone."

Big name advertisers seem to be throwing money at location-based services. Brightkite is reportedly charging between $10,000 and $20,000 for local promotions. Foursquare seems to be announcing a new A-list corporate partner every week, including Starbucks and MTV. And Shopkick, the treasure hunt of consumption, launched with Best Buy, Macy's and American Eagle among its sponsors - which had to install special audio transmitters in all their participating stores just so the app will know when a user walks in.

Advertisers are excited because location-aware ads really work, Becker said, citing a study that showed nearly 50% of users who are shown a location-aware ad on a mobile device will "take some action," beating out text messaging (37%) and Web display ads (28%).

But isn't that because location-savvy ads are fairly novel? Advertisers were also excited about display ads in the early days of the Web, when users were so unaccustomed to browsing that they clicked on anything that caught their attention. Doesn't it seem like the higher engagement reported for location-aware ads could be because a user is not used to seeing her city or neighborhood mentioned in an ad on her phone?

Newness may be inflating the numbers a bit, Becker acknowledged, but advertisers will just create more engaging and sophisticated ads as time goes on. But location is just one of many important factors in mobile marketing. Advertisers also consider a consumer's age, type of phone, even time of day.

"Location is not necessarily the goal of the interaction. Rather, location is a piece of information that provides context to the user experience and can create a more relevant and engaging interaction with the consumer," Becker said.

Advertisers in the U.S. will spend $1.8 billion on location-aware marketing in 2015, according to a recent report by market research firm ABI Research. (By comparison, advertisers in the U.S. spent $10 billion on search advertsing in 2008.)

Not every advertiser will care about location, said Neil Strother, a director at ABI Research who put together the report. For restaurants and bars, real-time location is crucial. But for NBC or Coke, not so much.

And there are lots of companies hesitant to join in the location game, Strother said. That's because of inexperience and fears about threatening consumers' comfort level. "The next few years will be very important for companies to get it right and not abuse the location information they're getting," he said.

Instead, the new "ShopAlerts" service is actually a white-label platform that allows retailers and other businesses to send location-triggered mobile text messages to consumers who've opted in to receive them.

Yes, geo-fenced, geo-targeted mobile couponing, discounts and promotions have arrived.

A "geo-fence" is a term which refers to a virtual perimeter around a geographical region. For example, geo-fencing technologies are used in certain child location services to notify parents when the child leaves a certain pre-designated area, such as their school or home.

In mobile location-based shopping services, such as the recently arrived ShopAlerts platform (it launched earlier this spring), geo-fences are used around each retail store in order to trigger the mobile alerts the service sends.

When a customer is within range of that store, a (relatively) accurate calculation based on neighborhood-level cell tower data, the alert is sent out via an SMS text message. The inability of smartphone-grade GPS to determine a precise location is actually used to the service's advantage. "ShopAlerts brings consumers into [retailers'] stores when they are in the neighborhood rather than engaging with the consumer once they are inside the store," explains Blair Swedeen, VP Market Development at platform creator Placecast, which is launching the service in partnership with location provider Location Labs.

But that's just one of the many differentiating factors between ShopAlerts and the new Shopkick mobile app. ShopAlerts also doesn't require special hardware installed inside the stores, as Shopkick does, nor does it require a specific mobile app installed on a specific brand of smartphone or smartphones.

Instead, shoppers opt-in to a retailer's mobile alerting system, a service marketed however the retailer sees fit. (Think Twitter updates, Facebook posts, websites, or even in-store signage). Once a consumer opts-in to receive alerts, they'll be notified with news of sales, promotions or other messages the retailer wants to send, but only when they're near the store.

That last part is the key difference between this and other mobile text-messaging based services. Although ShopAlerts won't necessarily know you're at Macy's or Best Buy specifically, as Shopkick does, it could see that you're at the mall shopping and alert you then. And because it's a "set-it-and-forget it" type of service, you don't have to remember to break out your phone, launch an app, check-in or scan barcodes. You would just get a text.

Not as Sexy as Foursquare, but Potentially More Useful?

ShopAlerts may not have the "geek chic" feel or the media hype that accompanies today's ever-growing list of location-based mobile services (Shopkick, Foursquare, Gowalla, MyTown, Brightkite, Whrrl, Loopt, WeReward, TopGuest, Hot Potato, SCVNGR, AroundMe, Poynt, Geodelic, and whew...who have we forgotten?), but that's OK with them.

After all, research from the Placecast-commissioned Harris Interactive study on mobile behavior showed that only 7% of men and 4% of women were currently using location-based "check-in" apps like those. 40%, however, were avid text message users. Lest you think the research is somehow tainted by Placecast's obvious conflict in interest, it's notable that the findings back up Forrester's earlier discovery that only 4% of U.S. online adults use location-based mobile check-in apps.

While both research companies acknowledged the hype surrounding the services, which may end up leading to real-world successes in the future, they're still very cutting edge, unknown entities to most of the mainstream mobile audience.

The ShopAlerts platform is noting today their partnership with clothing brand The North Face on board and more brands "signing on monthly."