Justin Hall (yes, the original links guy ... the protoblogger ... just saw him down at SXSW) reports on this fascinating Tokyo-based "item hunt" LBS game: Mogi.

This seems to really be getting to the potential of location-based services: the draping of one or more "data layers" over the physical landscape. Gaming, as described here, is one obvious application -- other business (you know, other than the "Walking by The Gap and get a coupon!" scenarios) and social mobile applications can also start to look at the world through LBS glasses.

I wonder if the publishers of this game have considered integrating marketing opportunities into the game itself: what if one of the "items" you had to gather was at a newly opened nightclub that only appeared late at night, or a noodle shop that was offering "lunch specials".

I've long been interested in LBS, but I've kind of resigned myself to the fact that we've still got a long way to go in North America before location-based applications will become viable. It's great to see things like Mogi taking off in foreign markets, though.

Source: TheFeature :: Mogi: Second Generation Location-Based Gaming

There's a neat convergence of location-based information and digital photography that's been talked about for a little while, with sites like GeoSnapper and a Japanese prototype called T'o'rip Space (whatever that means).

Came across this website World-Wide Media eXchange: WWMX and it looks like it's a really nice implementation of associating location information with an image. Once camera phones have location capabilities nicely integrated into the platform, that would seamlessly add a cool dimension to moblogging.

Scroll down to the bottom of the wmmx site and what do we see? "Copyright 2002-2003 by Microsoft Corporation". Well now, things just got even more interesting!

Source: World-Wide Media eXchange: WWMX

So here's what Stephen Wozniak is up to ... pretty much what we expected, except the fact that they're using the 900 MHz spectrum and producing their own base stations is a little bit of a surprise. $25 for a tag seems like a great price to maybe see some serious adoption.

We'll keep an eye on this!

Apple Co-Founder Creates Electronic ID Tags

Not crazy about the name: "geeplogs" is supposed to be "global positioning" logs ... the merging of GPS and blogs. This article is not too terribly interesting, but the final paragraph thinks about layering information on a physical space using RSS as a means to represent that information. I'm not sure that's an appropriate use of the RSS, but it's a different way of thinking about things.

The merging of GPS and the Web