The new killer application for mobile – it seems to be definite. Experts are in agreement. There’s no talk of Mobile TV, which indeed in Germany has received impetus during the last months, but has moved no small number of subscribers to dissatisfaction and so to a fast termination. There’s talk of GPS, short for Global Positioning System. “GPS is the new camera“ says Christian Lindholm of Fjord in an interview with Forbes.com. Camera because it was an extremely successful idea to integrate exactly a camera into mobile phone and as successful as that will be the integrated GPS, according to Lindholm.

“Chip prices are rapidly dropping, providers are dreaming big of monetizing location-based services.“ But not only they – industry giants have been panting for the best services à la “where’s the next pizzeria?“, since location and situation based information is the speedway to the big gold mine in Mobile Marketing. Yet in last year’s October the analysts of isuppli predicted that the sales mobile handsets equipped with GPS capability are expected to more than quadruple from 2006 to 2011.

The determination of position is not only useful for the person concerned and service providers. Mobile tracking has been an interesting subject for worried parents who want to know where their child is just staying (e.g. Track Your Kid).

Determining positions also functions without GPS by mobile phone masts – Google for example uses this technique – but even in big cities it’s possible to determine one’s position only within a radius of 300 meters. Without any knowledge of place that’s not really helpful.

Particularly promising seem GPS functions for Social Networks like a.o. with plazes or gypsii. Yahoo wants to bring the function of spotting and contacting nearby friends to perfection and even increases the value of the planned service oneconnect by the words “It’s time for a revolution“.

But by this there still are not all options exhausted. Up to now, for example professional mountain bikers have used special instruments to record their training track and achievement to analyse them later on the pc. Here begins Map My Tracks. Owning a GPS capable mobile phone, one can download the corresponding software and an additonal GPS instrument becomes redundant.

The radius of possibilites resulting from mobile phones with GPS capability is huge. Reason enough to give some thought to what extent one might want to track oneself and others.

Do you always fancy being found by others, anytime and anyplace? “Well, now I’m gonna buy quickly a bread and then – oh no, why am I NOW meeting that jabberer Tina?“ “I just had a look on my mobile and recognized that you are three streets down the road, and I thought we might quickly have some coffee…“ A wonderful technique when it comes to supervision of little children, but at the same time also a godsend for control freaks and overjealous partners.

Despite every comfort of a routing “per pedes“ it might be advisable to use the navigation system in the own brain if one doesn’t want to risk being unlivable in case of failing technique. There are many stories about truck drivers who trusted their navigation device blindly and ended up in much too narrow streets, where they at worst got stuck several days. On this world there are a lot of candidates who, as pedestrians, certainly will walk blindly into dead end streets and against street lamps…