Is it The disruption that starts a new era in mobile innovation, or is it just another Iphone clone? Whatever you think of the NexusOne, all has been thought and said in the last 12 hours.

My “keywords”

- Phone Store as opposed to App Store.  The implications are vast: these are two totally different business models with different targets and user experience.

-Unlocked. …An innovation only for the US…

-A New Web Model. Advertising (not limited to local search) will be the revenue driver as in everything Google. Not apps. It’s not ad-funded yet. But it could. You have to have a Google account to get the NexusOne….

- Speech recognition as the new UI. It’s not there yet, but sooner or later it will and people will consider multi-touch so ….2009.

-Image recognition as the next frontier. Nokia Point and Find is the only serious competitor.

-Open (or so goes the promise, so far).

Is it a revolution? In Steven Hodson ‘s words You can release a new superphone or iPhone everyday of the week but in the end it’s all just a bullshit game with the only winners being the wireless broadband providers. I highly recommend you read his entire post.

2009 has been a turning point for the Internet of Things, as ReadWriteWeb names it, a revolutionary ecosystem of permanently connected “sensors” which promise to make our lives better, more “intelligent”.

Mobile phones and new devices have emerged which could change our behaviors in disruptive ways. Here’s a few of them designed to support our efforts towards a better lifestyle.

Chose a Quiet Place – WideNoise

WideNoise is an iPhone application that samples decibel noise levels, displaying them on an interactive map. With WideNoise you can monitor the noise levels around you, and map it to see the average sound level of the area around you. Readings can be shared online with the WideNoise community and tweeted.

Iphone users can purchase WideNoise for US$1,99 from the Apple App Store.

Stay Fit – FitBit

Fitbit is a small device that you can clip on your waist, in your pocket or on undergarments, and it accurately tracks your calories burned, steps taken, distance traveled and sleep quality. Its 3D motion sensor your motion in three dimensions, and converts this into useful information about your daily activities.

FitBit

Anytime you walk by the wireless base station, data from your Fitbit is uploaded in the background to Fitbit.com, from where you can see detailed data and also participate in collaborative fitness goals with friends, family and co-workers.

It costs $99, but to have it you have to add yourself to the waiting lists since it is sold out.

Sleep Tight – MyZeo

MyZeo is an elastic headband, which you’re supposed to wear to bed each night. In its center there’s a transmitter pod which measures your brainwaves and transmits them wirelessly to the clock on your nightstand.

MyZeo

When you wake up, you put the headband back onto its charging shelf on the clock. The screen shows you a graph of your night. The optional alarm feature will look for a “natural awakening point” based on your sleep patterns.

MyZeo stores your sleep records on a memory card so that you can go to MyZeo.com and upload your data to the Web. The website lets you slice, dice and cross-compare your sleep data in various ways.  You can plot the quality of your sleep, or one type of sleep, over time, by week or month. Or see whether your bedtime affects how long you sleep, whether you get more deep sleep on weekends and so on.

MyZeo costs $299 or $349 for an additional sleep coach program.

It’s been the Year of the Apps.  There’s an app for everything:  from the alarm clock to running trackers to maps and shopping engines, going through e-readers, music players and restaurant finders. For every minute of your connected life, for every activity there is an app.

Each app is a new world of ubiquitous possibilities. But as with everything, there is a price to pay: fragmentation and closeness. Each platform has its own store, and owns your apps.  Add that app stores have been built without much of an “intelligence”, besides the top and new charts.

So what are the alternatives?

For a year and a half now, Mozilla has been working on what promises to be an “anti-app store”: Fennec, the first version of Firefox Mobile, which will be released on Nokia’s N900 handsets by the end of the year, and then on Windows Mobile and Android.

Mozilla Mobile Preview

What will Fennec do?

• Synch with the desktop version. Any web page open in a user’s desktop browser will automatically open in the mobile version in real time, without the user having to do anything!
• Tabbed browsing
• Tapping of the screen to zoom in on a page, plus auto-scaling of all images to fit the mobile screen.
• Add-ons- to add functionalities such as news readers or online games.
• Geo-location

And all of this will come without draining the phone’s memory. Take Mozilla’s word on it.

So,the question is: can Fennec win consumers and therefore attract developers?

The advantages of the Mozilla Mobile solution are tangible:

• Product focus: developers could focus on enhancing one product instead of recreating the wheel for each new platform.
• Reach: one release of the product could reach a cross-platform audience.
• Time to market: no approval process, no waiting or unclear rules to hold up the release process.
• Marketing: just the open world wide mobile web to conquer, not 10 different battles for 10 different chart highlights.

Despite all these advantages, native apps still seem to have an edge, and a strong one, when it comes to focus of the user experience and monetization. People pay for apps, they are not so inclined to do the same while in a browsing frame of mind. Apps are perceived as “products” that users pay for, especially when the payment method is a secure one click method. Apps are also “closed” environments and therefore focused on conversions, whereas browsing is always one click away from closing that tab and moving on.

Will Firefox be able to deliver an equally focused monetization path to its developers? Time will tell and that time is getting closer.

It used to be that if you wanted to pick a place for eating out, a fair amount of planning had to be factored in. You had to find a connection, check Yelp or Zagat, sift through the results and try to find the right inspiration among hundreds of reviews. Let’s even pretend that all this excruciating research payed back and it helped make all your dinners-out a fantastic, or rather a predictably fantastic experience.

Still there are 4 main issues:
1) The serendipity of dining out is totally lost.
2) Bias. Reviews condition our perception of a place. If we read complaints about bad service, we already get to that place with maximum adrenaline in our veins ready to fight against the incompetent waiter.
3) Reviews suck, let’s confess it. Who cares if your anniversary dinner was ruined by an imperfect ragu’…or a noisy ambience…Verbose is the best adjective that comes to mind for 90% of them.
4) Reliability-Enough said.

So here comes Foodspotting. What it does is as simple as disruptive: it enables users to snap pictures of a dish they’re enjoying, and broadcast it to the food-lovers community. And that’s it!

Why is it disruptive?
-It is all and only about food.
-It restricts your review to that single dish,the rest of the menu, the service, the decor might be horrible or fantastic: the serendipity is totally preserved.
-It is as truthful as a picture can be, very little room for fabrication and/or personal biases.
-Also, as with all new mobile service poised for success, FoodSpotting will come with a social reward system. Foodspotting users can become the “Champion” of their favorite dishes,compete to collect dishes through scavenger hunts and a food passport system. Trust will be gained through your participation inside the FoodSpotting eco-system.

Founded by designer Alexa Andrzejewski and Ted Grubb, FoodSpotting is an early stage startup with the Iphone app still under development.
Regardless of its success, FoodSpotting is surely paving the way for a new wave of user-generated reviews that are driven by image-discovery and vetted within communities of like-minded users.

Not yet convinced? Put your Goggles on and preview the future.

There are services and products that radically change our experience. Google. RSS. Twitter. The Iphone. The Kindle. FourSquare… But there’s also another category of less hyped, but not less relevant services, that help make our lives better. Think Dropbox or Evernote. Instapaper is one of these wonders.

What is it? The idea is simple: we all find ourselves in a situation where we really want to read something, but we don’t have the time. Some of us will keep 100 tabs open, in the hope to find the time later, others will bookmark it. Either way, that post is gone. Chances are you won’t read it.

Instapaper is that “Read Later” in your life. With a simple click on a bookmarklet, you can save in one central place all the items that you want to Read Later. The web interface is clean and simple, and offers additional features to help you stay organized (archive and folders), share your reads, and discover what’s hot among other Instapaper readers.

But that’s not all.

-Integration with Google Reader. Besides using Instapaper through the bookmarklet, you can also save items directly from your Google Reader, by using the function Send To. (thanks to @tamar and @scepticgeek for helping me discover this!).

-Iphone App. You can access your Instapaper items from an Iphone app which will transform your iPhone in a mini-reading tablet. There are two versions, a free and a premium one. The free version will  save up to 15 items. The premium one, Instapaper Pro, which costs only $4.99, can store up to 250 items and downloads articles in the background, so any time you have it open, it’s updating the list of stories for you to read. Other premium features include the option to share your articles with the Instapaper community and read popular articles that have been shared by others. (If you’re a Tweetie 2 user, you can save posts directly to Instapaper!).

-Kindle/E-reader “Integration”. Until last week, you could link your Instapaper to your Kindle account and it would synch-up daily or weekly. But you had to pay $0.15 for each of the emails sent and it turned out that the system was unreliable.  Instead of over-the-air download, now you can use a USB key, where the 20 more recent Instapaper saved articles will be transfered as Kindle-compatible .mobi file. Instapaper also supports ePub downloads, the format that many other popular e-readers use (like Sony Readers).

Instapaper is the work of Tumblr lead developer Marco Arment and was recently named by O’Reilly as one of the top 10 Iphone Apps. No surprise there!

Do you use it? Do you like it?

FourSquare, SimpleGeo, Layar, Junaio are the start-ups of 2009. Amen! This is good, this is beautiful, and this is the promise of mobile coming true.

But there is an area that is still under-rated and under-hyped, and that is as needed as geo-location and mobile augmented reality for mobile to come full circle. That area is Speech Recognition. 2010 could be the year when it eventually hits mainstream, the year when voice becomes the “next touch”.

Why would that be?

The foundations have all been laid out: advances in speech technologies, speech recognition APIs, faster networks, broadband, cloud computing, better devices with user-friendly interfaces, compelling applications.

Who could be the game changers? The fact of matter is that there is nothing more sci-fish than using voice as a command. Captain Kirk’s talking to his computer is the archetype of our dreams. But the reality is a steep wall of scepticism at best, bad perceptions most frequently, towards services that so far haven’t always proved themselves.

The winner won’t be necessarily the company with the best technology, but the one who can sell us back to our dreams…

-Apple

In June, Apple unveiled Voice Control, its new voice user interface. What it does is very simple: it allows users to make calls and control the iPod features on the iPhone 3GS by simply speaking. Voice Control can be used to

• make a call by saying the name or number,
• tell the iPod app to play a song, play a playlist, shuffle, activate Genius, or have it tell you what song is currently playing.

-Google

Google’s bet on voice as the killer app for mobiles is not even a question. Google has developed its own speech recognition system, originally deoployed for the GOOG-411 free directory. A shortlist of its most recent milestones include disruptive services as:

• Google Voice, with its voice-mails and text messages transcriptions.
• Google free  turn-by-turn voice navigation.
• Voice Search.

-Microsoft

In October, Microsoft announced a slew of new services based on speech recognition:

• A mobile version of Bing with voice-enabled search.
• Bing 411.
• The Samsung Intrepid from Sprint, the first Windows phone to use the voice user interface of TellMe, the start-up that Microsoft acquired in 2007 for over $800million dollars. Intrepid users can press the Tellme button on the phone and say what they want — whether that’s to call, text a friend, or search Bing.
• Ford Sync, an in-dash recognition and search system.
• Voice Mail Preview, a speech-to-text technology, which automatically sends a text preview of voice mail right to the user’s inbox.

Nuance Communications

Nuance Communications, a provider of various speech recognition and predictive text products, is the behemoth of the voice industry with an estimated $1billion in sales. Recently Nuance has purchased Jott, whose service translate spoken messages into text and emails, and can be integrated with various web services, such as a Salesforce. Just today, AT&T announced its partnership with Nuance to offer voice-mail transcriptions.

Vlingo

A Boston-area company, Vlingo began to gain traction in 2008, when Yahoo licensed its speech recognition technology to empower its oneSearch offering.

Vlingo also offers a mobile app for Iphones, Blackberry, Symbian and Windows Mobile phones. Once the app is installed, it becomes the Voice UI of your phone. All you have to do is press a button and start speaking. The voice clip is put through speech recognition software, running on a server, and converted to text. The results are sent back to the phone in a matter of seconds.

The Vlingo application can work with other applications such as maps, notes, email and it also lets users update their Facebook and Twitter with a simple voice clip.

Vlingo has also opened its platform to developers who want to add voice features to their apps.

-SimulScribe&Ditech

SimulScribe has been around for a while with its voicemail-to-text technology. But lately it has stepped up with an exclusive partnership with Ditech, worth $17 million dollars, and released a version of its technology aimed at enterprises, with its new ability to operate behind firewalls. PhoneTag, its voicemail-to-text solution, is capable of around 85% accuracy and offers a human-powered service which can get up to 97% accuracy.

Traditional advertising is becoming increasingly ineffective. And so much we all know.  But there is a new wave of mobile apps, which has the potential to accelerate its demise: Mobile BarCode Readers.

The first examples are two apps, now both available on the Iphone: RedLaser 2.2 and ShopSavvy. What they do, is allow users to scan a bar code (UPC code) and retrieve real-time data on the product scanned. The main features, common to the two apps, are:

-Price comparison through online shopping engine.

-Map of nearby stores that offer the same product, with relative pricing info.

-Access to users ‘reviews.

ShopSavvy was just launched on the Iphone, and it’s free. RedLaser has been around for a few weeks and it’s already  the second top paid app, for  only $1.99. What’s more RedLaser is also available to developers and users to create their own app.

Apparently, what’s happening under our eyes is a shift towards a new age of consumerism, where traditional advertising gets interrupted at the very final node of the purchase impulse: in store. Reviews shared by like-minded communities and shopping engines information make the consumer aware if something is wrong, break the spell of that impulse to buy.

What’s left to retailers and brands?

Umair Haque has been advocating a new paradigm of innovation for the 21st century, dubbed the Awesomeness manifesto. The message is simple: only ethical innovation will survive and propagate itself.

What is awesomeness? Awesomeness happens when thick — real, meaningful — value is created by people who love what they do, added to insanely great stuff, and multiplied by communities who are delighted and inspired because they are authentically better off. That’s a better kind of innovation, built for 21st century economics.

So, it’s good to see that new tools are coming to light, which could empower consumers and make them active agents of this change.

On the flip side, though, these same apps could also start acting like big brothers that learn about our shopping habits and patterns, and feed this stream of data back to advertisers, who would be now able to influence us, in new “intelligent” ways.

Which of the two futures is most likely to happen? Probably, as always, something in the middle…

According to the Wikipedia definition, in a crowd-sourced model, problems are broadcast to an unknown group of solvers in the form of an open call for solutions. Users—i.e. the crowd—form communities and submit solutions. Individuals, who participate, are rewarded economically (think of the Netflix challenge) or by means of social rewards (think of the Ted Open Translation Project, where translators are allowed to have a prestigious Ted profile).

There are various examples of companies, that have been entirely built on crowd-sourcing. Wikipedia itself is one. The Internet has provided us with an unprecedented ability to create networks of previously unreachable experts and connect their brain power.

But what happens when  instead of online, communities form in real-life and are ubiquitously connected through mobile devices? New problems can be solved, which science and technology had been unable to address.

Take Traffic as an example. Despite all the progress in technology, infrastructure and science of the last 50 years, we’re simply incapable of finding a smarter solution to traffic better than forcing ourselves to drive in inconvenient hours. Which in most cases is not an option.

Waze, an Israeli start-up, is tackling the problem from a newer perspective. As you drive around, the Waze mobile app – for Iphone, Android and Symbian phones- automatically feeds a real-time stream of data into the Waze engine (such as average speed and current location). Users can also send text updates and photos to help other drivers in the area stay up to date with what’s going on.

As more and more users drive a specific area, the Waze engine keeps learning and updating itself: it picks up on the streets, tendencies, and more to produce a driver-generated map. It also learns to rank its users, and assign them a trustworthiness score, based on the reliability of the information provided.

Waze Map

The challenges that Waze faces in order to become a game-changer aren’t small: it needs cartographers to complete its maps world-wide, since it doesn’t license any,  and it needs a critical mass of users.

But, despite its limit, Waze is a brilliant early benchmark of the dramatic impact that crowd-sourced information can have in our lives, when knowledge gets physically distributed in real-time and through social-connected devices, cell phones.

The potential applications are infinite.

Another example is CitySourced, a TechCrunch50 favorite. The app on your Blackberry, Android or iPhone has a simple goal: it lets you take a picture of an infraction and file a report to your city government.  The report goes off in real-time to a City Hall, complete with location data. On top of real-time data, city officials can also use the CitySourced analytics to predict and identify clusters and take action accordingly.

The app is free for the user and cities pay an annual license fee for the dashboard. CitySourced has already a deal with the city of San Jose, Calif. and received an investment from Palm.

In our connected ubiquitous future, what role will cash have? Are we moving towards a cash-less society, where payment will happen through your mobile device? PayPal, Amazon and Google seem to think so.

PayPal was the first to move into the space with its 2006 launch of the PayPal Mobile Checkout. But it’s only a few weeks ago that it unveiled its real ambition to become the payment method of the future, with its PayPal X platform – a set of API that lets third-party developers incorporate its online payment system into their own applications, online or mobile, Iphone included. PayPal X’s ‘enhanced’ pricing structure – a 50-cent flat-fee price point for a 3-day settlement, and a 75-cent fee for an immediate settlement – is also a direct shot at Amazon, the most direct competitor in the space.

Mobile Payments Service was launched by Amazon less than two months ago, to allow mobile developers and merchants to provide payment options to their customers within mobile Web sites and applications–leveraging on the convenience of the Amazon’s 1-Click checkout system. But with Amazon having existing relationships with hundreds of thousands of businesses, its quick expansion into the space is an easy bet.

And let’s not forget about Google. In a document sent to the Newspaper Association of America in September,  Google reveals that it is planning to unveil a micropayment system over the course of 2010, in the hope that newspapers will use it in their efforts to find a new business model. According to the document, the micropayment system will launch as an extension of Google Checkout.

But Amazon, Google and PayPal are not alone, an increasing number of startups is working on shaping the future of payments.

- Paying Through Your Mobile Bill. Zong.

The potential is clear. 4.6 billion users will have a cell-phone by the end of 2009.  Using a mobile phone, instead than credit cards and PayPal, has the advantage of making the user experience frictionless and accessible to a larger audience, which is what social networks, online gaming sites and virtual worlds are desperate for, in their continuous effort to monetize on the users’ impulses to buy that virtual gift or that extra level of a game.

This year, mobile payment service Zong has processed mobile payments for more than 10 million unique users worldwide. It has partnerships with 107 carriers in 25 countries, and deals with social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, virtual worlds and online gaming sites such as Gaia Online, IMVU and Outspark. Most recently it added to its roster Mochi Media,which according to ComScore is the largest online games property worldwide.

Want to buy your Facebook friend a virtual gift? Use  Zong, it’s as easy as entering your phone number and the PIN sent via text message. A no brainer? Yes and no, the hassle being that carriers want  their “unfair” share of the transactions, so building a sustainable business is a much tougher challenge. A Facebook credit with Zong costs 20 cents, with a credit card 10 cents. And that’s because of the carriers’share.

But as everybody knows, payments with mobile phone convert so much better that lower margins could be made up by volumes. And Zong is up to the challenge.

- Your Iphone as a credit card reader. Square.

A  new mobile payments venture called Square (previously Squirrel) was born from the fine mind of Twitter co-founder and chairman Jack Dorsey. What’s a Square? It is a hardware add-on that can turn an iPhone into a credit card reader.

From Coolhunting:

The innovation is in a small, plastic card reader that fits in to the headphone jack of an iPhone (or iPod Touch) and transfers the credit card’s swipe data to the app. After the employee enters the amount to charge, the customer confirms by scrawling their signature with their finger and then either one enters the customer’s email address to send the receipt to. The payment is processed by Square for a small percentage plus a fixed fee; the funds are transferred directly to the store’s bank account, cutting both time and complexity on the processing side. The customer’s receipt includes a map showing the location of the transaction which is handy for those who record, sort and file such things.

That Dorsey is also an angel investor in FourSquare, only proves the point of how potent mobile advertising and commerce could be in the very near future. Needless to say that hardware doesn’t spread as fast as software and it will take some time to gain traction, but the potential is so big that Dorsey could have really be up to the Next Big Thing after Twitter. For now, the service is in closed alpha in New York.

-Enabling Mobile Commerce. Billing Revolution.

A Seattle startup, Billing Revolution wants to make mobile payments as widespread as possible by empowering merchants to access the latest technologies of mobile commerce. In September, it announced a partnership with Authorize.net to help merchants who use the payment gateway conduct mobile transactions. The mobile credit card payment system allows more than 200,000 Authorize.net merchants to sell everything from coffee to magazine subscriptions to hotel rooms.

In October, Billing Revolution announced another key partnership with PayPal to enable mobile transactions for all PayPal merchants wishing to conduct mobile credit card transactions can easily use Billing Revolution to process transactions through their existing PayPal accounts.

Billing Revolution is backed by SK Telecom Ventures, the venture arm of South Korea mobile powerhouse SK Telecom. SK Telecom has been a leader in mobile payments in South Korea for years.

So, is there a winner yet? Not really and possibly there won’t be one, but many each one catered to a different target audience.

It’s the promised Mecca of Mobile: Local Advertising. Companies of various sizes are all scrambling to create the Killer App, that will allow users to search for surrounding businesses and events from a mobile phone.

FourSquare paved the way, by creating a disruptive user-driven ecosystem that combines:

• Local discovery
• Social filters
• User engagement

Check-ins and Badges, with their basic simplicity and social reward dynamic, have been a social revolution and a turning point in the local advertising industry. Still, FourSquare is a young model with many unanswered questions:

-How long does a game last, and how does it generate value for both end-users and advertisers?

• What happens when users will start losing interest in the game?
• How does it scale without losing its simplicity?
• How does the game affect users’behaviors-checking in for the pure badge reward as opposed to being interested in a place and what it offers?
• What happens to the game and its social rewards, when a larger number of venues start using FourSquare as an advertising platform?
• How does the game avoid being tricked (check-in and go away just for the goal of earning points)?

-CRM and loyalty programs

• How do promotions through FourSquare (e.g. a free beer for a major) evolve into a loyalty programs for a business owner?
• Will FourSquare share the users’ data?
• Will users have to set their privacy controls for each venue, when each of them will be an advertiser? Or  will being e.g. a mayor equate to getting bombarded by promotional offers?

-Aggregation

Are we going to have many FourSquares, each one for its target niche? A FourSquare for travelers, one for entertainment, one for shopping, etc? Will users have to manage tens of mobile IDs and networks?

-Brands

• Will big brands want to share their customer base and loyalty programs with their competitors?
• Or will you have to have your branded Macy’s FourSquare along with your regular one?

-Targeting

As pointed out very cleverly by Chris Messina, targeting with local search is what will decide who wins and who loses this game. Targeting for local advertising needs to evolve to an almost “artificial intelligence” algorithm, that mixes social ranking (good word from my friends), personal preferences, context (what time of the day, what day, where) and paid campaigns to offer the most relevant solution and create value for the end-user.

• Does FourSquare have the know-how and funds to build such a sophisticated machine?
• Does it have the sales force to maintain client relationships? How does it scale?

FourSquare for Business

Alternatives to FourSquare : Good bye Mobile Social Networks, Welcome Mobile Social Discovery

A new group of FourSquare competitors is emerging and what they have in common is that they were all former mobile social networks, that are now quickly reinventing themselves as mobile social discovery platform. Loopt and Brightkite fall into this category.

-Loopt Pulse: mixing social recommendations, editorial and mobile coupons

Recently mobile social network Loopt launched Pulse, which produces a personalized list of recommendations based on where you are, the time of day and your friends’ reviews.

Main features that differentiate it versus FourSquare:

• Editorial Content: Pulse pulls editorial descriptions and reviews from circa 20 partner sites, like Zagat, Citysearch, Eventful, DailyCandy, Thrillist and The Village Voice. Pulse also factors in more subjective factors, like which places are particularly popular with Loopt users at a given moment. Loopt shares revenues with all its content partners: when a user for example reads a Citysearch review and clicks on the restaurant’s Web site, both Citysearch and Loopt will earn money.
• Carriers and Apple’s Love:  Loopt gets revenue from cellphone carriers, which include its service in their data plans or use its technology to run their own location-based applications, and it also frequently featured by Apple.
• Advertising Platform And Mobile Coupons: with its new version, now Loopt includes LocationPoint ads from Nokia’s mobile mapping division NAVTEQ; the ads can be coupons tied to restaurants and stores in the users’ vicinity, and include click-to-call and click-to-route functionality. Sponsors like Target and Chili’s have already signed on.
• Reach: The Pulse upgrade is accessible not only on the updated iPhone but also as a BlackBerry app, and on all Loopt-enabled handsets
• Coming Soon: Augmented Reality and Social Game. Loopt recently acquired GraffitiGEO, a location-based app developer that had been working on an augmented reality rating and reviewing app including gaming features, similar to the Badges/Checkin from FourSquare.

Loopt

-BrightKite 2.0: Local Advertising through real-time behavorial targeting

Originally a TechStars startup, Brightkite was bought in April by Limbo, and has recently launched a new website and app, dubbed BrightKite 2.0. Let’s just say that the revamped app offers not much besides the now usual FourSquarish features, checking in, friending, steam of events.

But where it stands out is the self-serve advertising platform, which allows for location and real-time behavorial targeting. How that will play out in reality and move past the push model of online advertising is open for discussion. Chris Messina’s post raises some reasonable skepticism over its effectiveness.

Alternatives to FourSquare : Adding geo-location to existing services.

This category is still working behind the scenes, but signs of where it’s headed are becoming clearer by the day.

-Facebook

Take Facebook Lite, Facebook 65 million mobile users, its Lifecasting service on the Nokia Ovi Store, the millions of local businesses with Fan Pages, Facebook Connect for Mobile, mash them up and you see what could come next. Another social network morphed in a platform for local social discovery,  but this time rich of 320 million users, an existing advertising sales force, relationships with 160 carriers worldwide.

-Google Android, Latitude, Maps and Local Search

Imagine Android in 6 months, spread out on different hit phones, embed Maps and Navigation in them, add a social filter through Latitude, a layer of advertising intelligence and millions of businesses through local search. The result could be as big as the current Search business, if not bigger, when you factor in the zillions of local businesses in developing countries.

-Twitter

Lots of potential, like everything Twitter: with its geo-location API, more business could start offering targeted promos to local users, as some have started doing based on profile location and keywords. Only time will tell, but the smell of success is in the air.