Welcome again to our weekly update on location-based services and mobile positioning. 

Last week many of us got an earful of location technologies at the annual CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment event in San Francisco. LBS was front and center in many booths and venues and the technology is indeed ready for prime-time.. so it would seem! Navteq (and lead sponsor Nokia) used the event to prep developers for another round of the ever popular LBSChallenge - an event designed to give application developers and location-aware apps a shot in the arm. Challenge sponsors like Autodesk, deCarta, ESRI, SiRF, and WHERE (uLocate) were present and providing attendees with the latest on their solutions that will help developers take their applications to market. It should be noted that WHERE now has a N95 build for their platform, enabling rapid development of LBS applications supporting the "official device of the LBSChallenge" - the Nokia N95. On day 2 of CTIA week SiRF hosted what will likely turn into an annual event - the Location 2.0 Summit, and event designed to Drive Location Further Into the Mainstream. Presentations from all corners of the technology sphere were present, including Michael Jones of Google who's company is driving the evolution of not only the web but the mobile Web. Kanwar Chadha, founder of SiRF provided his vision for LBS and reiterated to attendees that GPS chips will indeed be in all mobile devices as we move forward - I have to agree and might add that GPS is not only wanted by users but expected. Panels made up of developers, carrier reps, venture capitalists, and device makers also took to the stage in front of more than 200 attendees to voice their opinions on where we're headed with Location 2.0 and the mobile web. All seemed to agree that consumers want LBS, however, monetizing the services is indeed a challenge. Ease of use needs to be addressed and there's also no doubt that carriers are making $$ (from data usage) and LBS is a money maker. I'd also have to pipe in the marketing is a problem and the issue of privacy and security is still front and center. The message for attendees to take home from the Location Summit - Lets embed LBS into everything already out there and make it better! Interesting to note, just this week research findings have revealed a trend that mobile developers seem to be favoring the Google platform for building location-aware applications. The survey by Evans Data (conducted worldwide in September) showed that 38.4 percent of developers preferred using Google technologies for location based development! Please note, Photos from CTIA are now posted on our Flickr CTIA Set

View the October 31 Editon of LBSzone Alert HERE