When you are presented with information from the results of using a search engine or through the use of a customized portal like myYahoo, the information is filtered and or sorted with reference to some preconditions defined by the user, using the source of the content or by matching text strings to relevance and frequency of use. What until recently has not been used is the location of that information. For example, if I type the term "Indian Restaurant " into the Google or Yahoo search engines the first restaurant listed in Google is a restaurant in Ottawa Canada, and the first in Yahoo is in Auckland, New Zealand. In both cases this is a result of frequency analysis suggesting that these are the most referred to and therefore the most relevant. I carried out this search sitting a home in London, in the UK, nearly 24 hours travel time away from Auckland ! Would it not be more useful if the results were also ranked with distance from my location? My customized portal of information always supplies me with the same content, weather in the part of England I live, the evenings television shows, my local cinema times and news headlines from the London evening newspaper. This very useful single view of information is delivered to me because I have at some point in the past spend the time creating my portal, selecting and modifying the "widgets" of the portal published to meet my needs. As you may recognise much of the information on my portal page is local or location dependent, so it is often unhelpful when traveling away from home on business to be presented with the London weather forecast. Imagine how much more useful if would be if the local weather information was provided automatically whenever you viewed the portal away from home. The lack of embedded geospatial technology to provide context to these type of applications is inconvenient for the desktop or laptop user, as they more often than not have the ability to quickly search out the actual information they require using a full sized keyboard and a high bandwidth network connection. These are unfortunately not available for many mobile users who are in greater need of the filtering effects of geospatial context. Location based services 2.0 The geospatial information needs of mobile users was to have been delivered by LBS - Location Based Services, but in most markets, the high hopes around the rapid uptake of LBS have not been realised. The failure of LBS 1.0 has been due to a number of issues, the most obvious ones I would argue where not actually the most problematic. Initially the ability to locate a user in terms of the first LBS applications was expected to be delivered by using various carrier network techniques to locate a users mobile phone. Many have argued have that such techniques have not delivered a high enough accuracy for many types of applications, for example the ability to deliver personal navigation applications relies of a location accuracy greater than 10 metres, while the best cell based techniques of determining the location of a mobile device offered accuracies in the order of 100 metres.  To some extent these limitations are accounted for through the increased availability of GPS receivers integrated on mobile phones, often driven by public safety legislation, however I would argue that accuracy was not the major issue. |