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Location-based mobile applications, also now being called "check-in services" to differentiate themselves from other geo-aware apps like Google Maps, are the hottest new social applications on the mobile scene today. The lineup includes game-based applications like Foursquare and MyTown, which each provide points, credits and/or badges for "checking in" (registering your physical presence) with a particular venue. There are also dedicated shopping-related check-in services like Shopkick, which rewards retail customers with discounts and deals for patronizing select establishments.

But almost all of the check-in apps integrate some form of mobile advertising. After months of experimentation with various formats, marketers are starting to discover what strategies actually work.

Remember PleaseRobMe.com? The website, which warned of the dangers in sharing your physical location online, now has a successor called I Can Stalk U.

While PleaseRobMe (now shuttered) focused on how publicly broadcasting your location could alert criminals to an empty house nearby, ideal for burglarizing, the new site aims to raise awareness about the dangers of geo-tagged photos, specifically the ones shared from your smartphone to social networks like Twitter.

Wisconsin developer Marc Harter has released a new Web service, command line tool and open source software called Ogre, which transforms geographic data from 16 different formats into GeoJSON, the preferred new format for geolocation Web app developers.

"When you take data from a old non-web formats and make them Web friendly, then great things happen," Adam Duvander, editor at developer blog Programmable Web and author of the forthcoming book Map Scripting 101, said of Ogre's release.

A new application called "Mayorama" has just arrived in the iTunes Application Store to help users of the Foursquare location-based social networking service more easily earn the title of "mayor," the honorary designation awarded to those who have checked in the most at a particular venue. Regular visitors to their local Starbucks, for example, can become "Mayor of Starbucks," a title which provides a discount on their next Frappuccino purchase in addition to the accompanying bragging rights. Mayors of clothing store Ann Taylor, meanwhile, receive 25% off on their next clothing purchase.

Although rewards and discounts like this are still few and far between, as the location-based social networking space grows, achieving these coupon-friendly virtual mayorships will become more important to thrifty shoppers as well as to competitive players who simply like to accumulate their crowns.

What's worse, for marketers hoping to tap into a diverse and savvy audience of shoppers, diners, and other local consumers, the details on audience make-up are disappointing. According to Forrester, LBS users are 80% male and 70% are aged 19-35.

So should marketers stay away for now until these services mature? Absolutely not. And here's why.

The International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), a non profit research organization in Berkeley, California, is due to present new findings next month regarding "cybercasing," a word researchers coined to refer to how geotagged text, photos and videos (those that include location information) can be used by criminals and other dangerous parties to mount real-world attacks.

Using sites like Craigslist, Twitter and YouTube, the researchers were able to cross-reference information contained within publicly available online content to determine the exact home addresses of potential victims, even those who had posted the content anonymously. The experiments didn't take weeks, days or even hours of research either - the addresses were pinpointed with GPS-level accuracy within minutes.

Remember PleaseRobMe? The social experiment (now shuttered) formerly displayed real-time updates from Foursquare users who publicly broadcasted their current location via Twitter. In aggregate, the site's founders said, this data could be used by burglars looking to find empty houses to rob.

Although many in the tech community dismissed the experiment as engaging in fear-mongering and scare tactics to make its point about the potential dangers of location-based services, it may have actually hit a nerve among mainstream users. According to a new survey of over 1,500 social networking users who own geolocation-ready mobile devices, over half (55%) are worried about the loss of privacy that comes with the use of mobile applications which broadcast your location.

Looking at life through rose-colored glasses? How about walking through your town and seeing it as the Huffington Post or the Independent Film Channel sees it? IFC announced a new campaign this morning with leading location-based social network Foursquare that will allow you to do just that. The Huffington Post launched a Foursquare layer today as well.

IFC polled its member base for short descriptions of their favorite places in the towns they lived in or visited, then picked the place-descriptions that best suited the IFC's brand ("Always on, slightly off") to upload into a Foursquare database. Foursquare users can now opt-into getting those tips pushed to them whenever they check in near one of the annotated locations. It's a chance to effectively say, "I want to see this town as IFC fans see it." For marketers, this has got to be incredibly appealing, and for urban explorers it could be one of the best examples yet of effective Augmented Reality.

If you're an early adopter, you've not doubt heard of (and probably even use) mobile "check-in" applications. Popular location-based services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, Whrrl, TriOut, Loopt and others are all the rage these days, even earning magazine cover stories about the so-called "check-in wars," as different companies fight to win this space the way Facebook won the desktop.

But after spending a few weeks "checking in" at every venue, bar, restaurant or club you visit, the excitement wears off and a question comes to mind: "why am I doing this?" you may ask yourself. The rewards are, in most cases, minimal: a point, a badge, a meaningless "mayorship" that's soon stolen away and the occasional mobile coupon. Do any of these things make check-ins worthwhile?

What would? A new service called Topguest may have the answer.

"Whether it's from a constellation of small satellites or whether it's from a blimp or some other type of airborne drone that's capturing data on a continuous basis," ERDAS President Joel Campbell told Directions Magazine in a recent interview, "I do think we will find a place where real time or near real time data is available from remote sensing technologies." [Em. added.]

It's growing increasingly apparent that the near-term future of technology will include explosive quantities of data, sensor-based tracking of physical objects and location as a platform for the development of scalable cloud-based software and services - all in real time. Even satellite imagery in real time. But does the prospect of dramatically more democratic access to these kinds of technologies offer substantial enough gains for everyday people to warrant paying the potential cost to privacy? Campbell says privacy concerns are being dealt with, but either way, the potential benefit to innovative software developers of real-time, analyzed, satellite imagery is staggering.