How important will location based services on your mobile device become and how long will it take?

Location based services are poised to take off. Though I think the way it will take off is different than what we might think today.

To me GPS (or similar) only gives a snapshot of the users location giving services no time to prepare. What if software could accurately predict your future location based on historical and current events (local or remote).

This might sound futuristic, but the technology pieces to do this exist today, they are just too disparate (hence our goal to add this technology to our mobile application framework).

Humans are very predictable assuming you have the right data sources available. So if you could predict the future location (say an hour from now), then GPS becomes a confirmation technology that can set off pre-planned services.

Simple Example: Your calendar has you at a romantic dinner with your wife at 6pm at a downtown restaurant. And for some odd strange reason you will meet her down there (instead of picking her up....just to make my example simple). Your mobile should be able to set your scheduled arrival time at 6.30 if it notices that traffic is bad, signaling your wife to let her know you're running late, and the restaurant to let them know you want to move your reservation by 30 minutes. The singing flower delivery boy (don't ask....) will also be notified to come 30 minutes later.

To make this possible GPS becomes a data source to the overall LBS service. The GPS tells the intelligent LBS that your at location X and the LBS module can easily check traffic data sources, calculate that you're 30 minutes behind schedule, and then kick-off the above services.

To me this is a lot more interesting than putting GPS in the center of LBS. But again, a technology like this makes much more sense when it is put in the context of the end-user, and not the context of the developer who made the software.....that's the hard part.