Last Friday I ventured north to Nottingham, along with Ed Parsons, Steven Feldman and Muki Haklay to attend the one day Supporting the Contextual Footprint event run by the Horizon Digital Economy Research institute at the University of Nottingham. Along the way I discovered a manner of tracking my journey that I'd hadn't previously considered, but that's covered in a previous blog post.

The focus of the Horizon event was to discuss the infrastructure needed to support location in its role as a key context and to identify any research theme that came out of the discussions; a classic case of the ill defined and fuzzy interface between the commercial world and that of academia.

51° 31' 36.8364" N, 0° 7' 44.0466" W

Entering the longitude and latitude above into one of the many online mapping sites on the web will  show you the St. Pancras branch of wallacespace, close to London's Euston and Kings Cross St. Pancras rail termini and seems a fitting and apt way to write a blog post about WhereCamp EU, the first geo unconference to be held in the United Kingdom and in Europe.

The last week has been crammed with planning for and finally realising the first WhereCamp unconference to be held in Europe. More of that later but before WhereCamp EU, there was the London Twitter Developer’s DevNest.

Angus Fox, one of the organisers of the DevNest, had first got in touch with me last year after the launch of the Yahoo! Placemaker web platform that allows recognition of place references in unstructured text. Placemaker plus Twitter status feeds seemed an ideal candidate for a mashup and Angus was keen to get me to talk to his hard-core Twitter and social media literate developer audience.

Last night I was at LBi in the old Truman Brewery on London's Brick Lane for Mashup's Location ... It's Moving On. I've spoken at a Mashup event once or twice before but this time the organising team threw caution to the wind and asked me to chair the panel discussion.

Prior to kicking the panel discussion off, I attempted to gently suggest some topics to my fellow panelists that we might want to discuss.

We started off with a quick review of my Theory of Stuff and how it applies to deriving value from location and location data and briefly visited Gartner's hype curve which puts location based services on the so called Plateau of Productivity. This is a good thing apparently. I then presented the panel with a series of  "yes, but" style trade offs to mull over.

• Smartphones vs. other phones; 21% of phones expected to have GPS by EOY 2009, but what about the other 79% without?
• LBS and LBMS vs. other (older) location systems (APIs and so on); LBS and LBS apps get all the publicity but what about key location APIs, platforms and services?
• "where's my friends" vs. creating value and creating data; "where's my friends" doesn't work as a (sole) business proposition but creating value added data does -- FourSquare and Gowalla are creating geotagged local business listings from check ins.
• "where's my business" vs. location based advertising; Tesco and Starbucks are the latest companies to launch apps to drive customers to their premises, but what's needed to drive location based ads?
• "where I think you are" vs. "where I say I am"; For a user, being able to be their own source of truth is imperative, but how can you reconcile this with your business needs?
• "where you are" vs. "where you've been"; (AKA tracking vs. privacy) How to walk the fine line between providing enhanced relevance via a user's location and being accused of tracking them.

Telematics, the use of GPS and mobile technology within the automotive business, and the Web 2.0, neo and paleo aspects of location have traditionally carved parallel paths, always looking at if they would converge but somehow never quite making enough contact to cross over.

But not any more.The combination of 3G mobile communications and GPS enabled smart-phones such as the iPhone and the BlackBerry means that one way or another, the Internet and the Web are coming into the car, either in your pocket or into the car itself.

Think about the following three scenarios for a moment ...

Scenario One. You go to a conference. It doesn't matter where or what the topic is but you turn up because you've been invited or because you've paid to attend. Breakfast is included in the conference package. There's 400 people attending the conference but when you get to the breakfast table, there's none left because they've run out of food. When you ask the conference venue why there's no breakfast they throw up their hands and say "The company who provides our food assured us there'd be enough for 400 but only enough for 200 turned up. What can we do?".

And now Scenario Two. Same conference. Same venue. But this time there's only 200 chairs in the venue and you've got 400 people trying to cram into those chairs. It's getting pretty cozy and people are ending up standing or going home. You ask the conference venue why there's no chairs and they throw up their hands and say "The company who provides our chairs assured us there'd be enough for 400 but only enough for 200 turned up. What can we do?".