Does Your Phone Know Where You Are?

Many phones now come equipped with the ability to find their location pretty much anywhere in the country using one of two common geolocation methods. The first is to triangulate off of pings on cell towers - using the phone network itself to figure out where the phone is in relation to various towers.

The second method is for the device to detect a wireless signals and send this back to the network computer which compares these to the signal's "IP and Mac addresses" and then uses a database of these locations to get an approximate location. Although most phones are not activated to do this the technology is here now and it's only a matter of time before you'll be able to locate your friends to within meters of their actual location.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting on this trend.

Practical joke uses aside, this technology is very powerful in social applications where, for example, a Facebook profile could include the exact location of your travelling friends. Another exciting application of geolocation in devices will be cameras that tag the picture with the location automatically, making Flickr, Picasa, and other photo sharing websites much more robust as this will allow mapping photos to their locations around the world.

A major startup getting a major capital injection and lots of positive buzz is Loopt, which offers a great user interface with Dodgeball like capabilities for interacting with friends. However, at $4 per month I wonder if Loopt may have trouble gaining much traction as free offerings come on board quickly in the mobile space. $4 per month is a tiny fee, but people are increasingly sensitive to the nickel and diming of the mobile space. Google is likely to respond aggressively this fall with ad-supported mobile options and I think the "free services" model is very likely to prevail in location based services.