Rainer links to an interesting NYT article about the recently introduced My Location feature in Google Maps mobile. Actually the first thought coming to my mind when I heard about My Location two weeks ago was: “How come that Google knows cell tower positions, almost worldwide?”.
As far as I know it’s one of the best kept secrets among mobile carriers. Christopher Schmidt gave a talk about that issue at the Where 2006 conference, explaining the ignorance of most mobile carriers and showed us his GSM location hack.
According to the NYT article, Google gathers cell location information the same way as Christopher did: users equipped with mobile phones and GPS devices send cell and location information back to a central unit, where it’ll be provided for other users without GPS devices.
Or in other words, Google uses GPS enabled mobile phones, like your 800,- EUR Nokia N95 for instance, to enhance their service. Strangely not every Google employee supports this strategy and dare to sell a N95 on eBay.
However, Rainer points out, and I totally agree, that an API for LBS is needed. We have seen what happened when developers gained access to geographic information through APIs. LBS has been the next big mobile thing for a couple of years now. I think an LBS API could finally make it happen and bring thousands of ideas and map mashups to mobile devices.