I have been spending a lot of time thinking about how the rise of location based technologies in cell phones and their integration into online mapping services. A couple interesting companies are Loopt and BrightKite.
I think this movement of the web to a more geography based system is really interseting. It is the flip side to the “global village” concept or the “globalization” concept where so much thinking is based around the reduction in the importance of location. You can effectively be a business based anywhere and have reach across the globe – space and place in this equation don’t matter.
However, the interesting feature that cell phones are bringing into the game is the importance of location. Where are you? Are we close? Where are all my friends? What business am I close too?
These are now questions we can answer in a way that we were never able to before. I am rather fascinated by this merging of technologies and reshaping of space and place.
I got back to the USA just the other day and while digging around on the net – checking in on some of my favorite blogs I came across a conference that started today in Burlingame, CA (just south of San Francisco). It is called Where 2.0 and looks rather interesting. In fact if I had $1800 to shell out I probably would have rushed off. In the meantime all I have is the ability to read whatever they put on their site. Maybe next year!!
I think that there is so much interesting stuff going on as the cell phone merges with the web and offers a huge amount of interesting and promising relationships as we move forward.
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