Four or Five years ago when I was first geting into the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) space, telematics was one of the hot fields. Telematics was dominated by vehicle and fleet tracking, so I would consider it to be the pre-cursor to what we now refer to as Location Based Services (LBS). At the time I was not very interested in the field. There were already several established players in the field and I didn’t see a lot of room for innovation. This began to change a little when location enabled cell phones started to become available, but even then, most of the ideas I heard about involved location aware advertising. I still didn’t see a field that I could get excited about.

That was before my colleague Dennis Baldwin introduced me to ideas that amounted to applying Web 2.0 concepts to the field, and before GPS enabled phones were available for less than $100, such as the Motorola i415 available from Boost Mobile for $29. I now see a great deal of room for innovation. Being able to share your location with friends is an obvious starting point, but it is just the tip of the iceberg.

We will see the real innovation after we have enabled others to easily create LBS mash-up applications. The first enabling technology for this will likey be GeoRSS. GeoRSS was originally envisioned as a way for normal RSS items to be tagged with a location. This is a pretty cool idea in itself. This allows you to search for blog entries about a location, for example. However, GeoRSS can also be used to provide RSS feeds where location is the primary piece of information. You could publish an RSS feed of your current location or Starbucks could publish a feed showing its store locations.

All of the major web map providers now support GeoRSS, so putting a map on a webpage that shows any combination of GeoRSS feeds is trivial. For example, Alan Brown publishes an RSS feed of California state parks and Ducky Sherwood publishes a feed of California prisons. If I wanted to create a map showing both, I could go to a webite like Mapufacture and do just that, which I already did in about 5 minutes and Here it is.

This probably doesn’t seem like a very compelling example, because it isn’t. But as the amount of information available as GeoRSS grows, particularly when more of that information is dynamic, far more interesting applications will emerge. More on that later….