Despite the Foursquare / Gowalla hype, Mobile LBS really isn’t a new thing. But, it seems like this time are buying it ! Yet there’s nothing innovative in Foursquare’s service. The confidentiality issues remain, but apparently the fact that firing up the application lets you win mayorships or medals or points somewhat make things acceptable by those who have been criticizing previous LBS service.
Yet the market, fueled by local ads, is a completely new territory to address which may be as big as Google’s Adwords. As usual it’s chicken and egg, nobody really invested in building up local ad networks while there were no real source of traffic for such ads, apparently this is starting to change. It may be the time to start reconsidering the viability of Local Advertisements, which will have special needs in terms of salesforce and sales mechanism that are very different from legacy Internet-based advertisements.
In France, “PagesJaunes” may be on of the few ready for this challenge, with an ability to list and upsale services to local business.

Daniel a former student of mine in entrepreneurship courses at Telecom Paris launched its first venture : it’s called “SlashWars” and is a location-based role playing game in a very funny environment and leveraging on the built-in accelerometer to let you slash your opponents (see the screencast video below). With his team they built a complete universe and the result is really amazing.
Kudos to them!
They submitted their work to the SFR JTD contest due last week, wish their good luck !

Finally managed to have latitude work on my Android phone this costed me a firmware update and a complete factory reset but now it’s working! Basically it’s built right into google maps 3.0 and it’s fairly easy to use : just add friends from your address book and latitude will share with them your position. When on your PC a widget lets you see where they are.
Nothing really groundbreaking here – Mobiluck has been doing the same for years now but still it’s nicely implemented and maybe it will be easier for Google to reach critical mass which is key for that kind of service in order to be fun and useful !