Hot mobile & Geo-location platform

"The idea that we can have a query free, geographically relevant search is really exciting." from Yahoo FireEagle: Geolocation made simple.

Ever since i bought my iPod touch, i realized that the next BIG thing is happening on mobile. I am usually not geek enough to be an earlier adopter of new technology, so when I am getting more and more stuff done on my beloved small gadget instead of the computer, it is the singal that it's about the time to GO Mobile.

Mobile computing, mobile search, mobile advertising, etc, yes, everything mobile related would get extremely hot in the next few years. Among all of these, geo-location platform might be one of the most important driving force as this is what most of mobile killer application based on.

From the research perspective, what interests me most is probably how people gonna share their geo-location data without causing too much trouble on personal privacy. It is right now the hot topic in academia. The most recent one would be this SIGMOD'08 paper

Private Queries in Location Based Services: Anonymizers are not Necessary

• Gabriel Ghinita, Panos Kalnis, Ali Khoshgozaran, Cyrus Shahabi, Kian-Lee Tan

I plan to attend their session in the next week, and will come back to this point later.