Welcome again to our weekly update on location-based services and mobile positioning. Making news this past week affecting the LBS ecosystem are Navteq, Tele Atlas, Google,  and many others.

Wow... we go 7 days between publishing a newsletter and the industry gets turned upside-down... well, not totally, but there has indeed been some exciting developments. Case in point, Google and the OpenSocial movement. Obviously this is very significant to those of you considering application development for the mobile social networking space - in case you hadn't noticed this is a HUGE growth area and we're already seeing amazingly creative applications coming out almost daily. Just this week I've really picked up my use of Jaiku, and utterz... both enable me to do some cool things with my mobile (anytime, anywhere) and also take advantage of positioning. Even more recently I added Earthcomber to my mobile deck. This app available from the Nokia content download client (this comes embedded on most new devices) provides location-aware search and yields some excellent results.

Speaking of local search, I found another great app just yesterday in Boopsie. Indeed the name is a bit, well, goofy, however, the app is way cool. Once again local search results are provided but the kicker here is that the app provides a gateway to common search results accessible by only a couple of clicks or keystrokes... very nice. Finally, we can't leave off without mention of Android. No doubt you've heard about the effort of Google and friends to bring about an open development environment for mobiles. The development of Android will be driven through the Open Handset Alliance by providing developers a new level of openness that enables them to work more collaboratively, Android will accelerate the pace at which new and compelling mobile services are made available to consumers - according to Google. Where will this go? Well, that will be answered in a few months once developers have had a chance to start developing with SDKs which are set to be opened up next week on Nov 12. The final piece to this puzzle may play out early next year when the next wireless spectrum auction takes place - recall Google is expected to pony up some cash for a piece of the wireless spectrum. A great read on Google's plans can be found in the NY Times article - the author notes the following: "The technology is expected to provide cellular handset manufacturers and wireless operators with capabilities that match and potentially surpass those using smartphone software made by Apple, Microsoft, Nokia, Palm, Research in Motion and others." I guess we'll see about that. It is interesting to note that Nokia is absent in the list of partners... no surprise since they dominate the smartphone marketplace with devices that use the popular and open Symbian S60 platform (more than 24 million symbian smartphones shipped in Q3 07!) - this should indeed be fun to watch unravel! PS: Don't forget about deCarta's devCON'07, next week in San Jose, CA. 

See this week's LBSZone Alert HERE