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"Walking down a city street, your mobile phone rings with a warning. You are getting too close to a high-crime area, as a quick glance at the mugging rate on the screen's 3D city map reveals, and the automated system offers better directions to where you want to go. But if you need to summon a taxi or call for more urgent help, rest assured the location data will be sent automatically. The emergency services will know exactly where to find you.

This is the near future according to LBS, or location-based services, on phones, palmtop computers and in-car navigation systems with an alphabet soup of fancy features. These could include voice communications (GSM), always-on internet connections (GPRS) and the ability to get a fix from the network of global positioning satellites (GPS). But what really helps turn these raw technologies into useful services is the GIS (geographical information system) running in the background. In other words, a very smart map....

Being able to put different data sets on the same map allows all sorts of possibilities, especially if you have maps of things like crime incidents, road accidents, house prices and supermarket purchases. British police forces may not want to make detailed maps of crime patterns publicly available, with animations to show changes by time of day and things like school holidays, but it will happen in parts of the US, if it hasn't already....

Guillaume Dordes, vice president of marketing for Alcatel's Nextenso, explains: 3G 'allows for a new business model' where the phone becomes a marketing medium, like television. 'The current operator model is based on paying services, but with 3G, you can either have a free service with advertisements, or else you pay.'

So if you don't pay for directions, or whatever, you may find that every shop within three streets will want to buzz your smart phone with virtual flyers and money-off coupons. And if you are ever involved in an accident, its colourful little screen could become a prime site for wireless adverts for ambulance services, private hospitals, and special offers on insurance policies. I'm sure you are looking forward to that." [Guardian Unlimited, via Lockergnome Bytes]

An interesting article with a U.K. perspective that also explores business applications of this technology and the hurdles the whole process still has to jump (standards, implementation, etc.).

With all of the local community information libraries collect, it'd be nice if we could sneak in under the radar and provide location-based services for folks. For example, I was involved in administering NorthStarNet for a while, and this network of community sites run by public libraries pulls together a lot of information that a new resident, visitor, or even a long-time resident might want to know.

With many libraries already aggregating and organizing this kind of information (especially online), we'd be extending our services if we could get that information to nearby people knowing they are in our town right now. Plus, we could notify them about events at the library, and maybe even let them search Zagat's and other commercial databases for relevant restaurant reviews, etc. Most regionally-based portals have failed miserably because the business model just isn't there (at least, not yet), but we're all about freely disseminating it.

It's interesting to think about the different class of databases libraries might want to pursue in a pervasive-internet world.