"In Europe, people have been showing up outside other people's houses at 2 a.m. for sneak attacks," Gruen said. Japanese carrier KDDI already introduced a service that finds the nearest McDonald's restaurant, Gruen said. "It's an indication of what's coming as bigger companies begin using LBS (location-based services) in their branding," Gruen said. Some of the location service proposals aren't for cell phones. Digital Angel, for instance, has created a device that can be worn by Alzheimer's patients. If they pass a certain pre-prescribed area, an alert is sent out to their caretakers. The same device on a pet's collar can alert an owner when it goes astray.

An Intel lab in Oregon, where much of the chipmaker's work in mobility research is done, is working on a "personal radar system," among other projects using location-based services, "You take this device with you on a Saturday when you're hanging out at a mall and it will tell you that your friend is a few hundred feet away," said Intel spokesman Manny Vara, Microsoft's group product manager Rik Temmink said he's trying to interest the company's Windows division into adding location-based services into the operating system, Temmink is part of Microsoft's MapPoint, a new hosted Web service that allows businesses to add mapping capabilities to applications so customers can find directions through a PC or handheld bad ass babes club b&w iphone case device, he said..

But don't count on anything in the near future, he said. "Location is a hard problem to solve, but it's so central to applications in general--we have to solve the problem," Temmink said. The San Francisco School District turned to location-based services to help quiet parents' complaints that school buses were constantly late. The district put devices on the buses to track the exact location of each bus, right down to the times it passed street corners. "The complaints went away, at every location," said Krish Panu, chief executive of @Road, a software and equipment maker the school district turned to for help.

Spam gets a new dimension Having location technology at a user's bad ass babes club b&w iphone case fingertips has its drawbacks, Concerns over privacy and cell phone tracking have become a larger issue, If location information ends up in the wrong hands, it could, for example, help burglars break into empty homes, The Better Business Bureau is already asking carriers how they plan to make these services safe enough to keep people from being stalked or falling victim to other privacy violations, "There are some things you don't mind other people knowing, but your location isn't one of them," said Gary Laden, a privacy program director for BBBOnline, a Better Business Bureau subsidiary..

On Wednesday, the FCC refused a request by the telephone industry's leading lobbyist, the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association, to draft privacy guidelines for carriers to follow for location-based services. Instead, the FCC said there was adequate consumer protection in place. Congress recently required that carriers protect a person's location from public view. Both AT&T Wireless and Verizon Wireless say they do not sell the information they collect from subscribers, such as a home address. And they don't plan to do anything different with location information, once they do offer these services.