Amazing !

staggering growth ! thanks for drawing the distinction, great times ahead

Great post Auren !

Diego, great article about a great car ! Can't wait to see one, and in due course of life - own one ! Your closing sentence says it all - why be beautiful when you can be interesting

thanks for the compilation Dev, very handy.

Ivan, Dev: from my experience, the challenge is getting the operators to understand the value of building a platform that allows apps to leverage location as a context. they often get wrapped up in the value of different forms of data, and start to count the beans too early in the process. for a persistent locationing model, the charging paradigm shouldnt be based on every dip (or push), but should rather be a CPA style revenue share. this allows some innovation to see the light of day and bring in some revenues, versus pricing it out of the park and getting nothing. Advertising is often a good first application, and doing a hyperlocal ad network (pull only, not push ...from user p.o.v) is a good starting point to make the economics work for both sides. Keep in mind, the netbook and USB dongle sales are growing pretty rapidly and the ad inventory available there is significant to generate meaningful ARPU for the operator.

Dev, thanks for writing a thoughtful article about the different slices of the pie. Your call for persistent-locationing, in my view, can best be delivered by the conduit i.e. the network. The question that comes to mind is how you can distribute this context in an elegant fashion (while keeping consumer privacy at the forefront). Operators have long spoken about developer API's but none have delivered an interesting platform to attract the bleeding edge entrepreneurs. if every HTTP request had location in it, that would make life very interesting.

same here Dev ...waiting patiently since 11 days ;-)

Solid observations Dev, this is clearly the way I try to learn about people before interacting with them. services like About.Me serve as a good aggregation function.

Steve, your definition of generative is more befitting the underlying meme of this discussion. A platform that creates a level playing field for participants of all sizes while delivering a great customer experience (or value of some form) is the key ingredient for it to be generative. the success of a platform (whether the iphone OS, or the Internet) depends largely on customer adoption ...and not on a set of legalese that protects one side over another. customer adoption directly depends on the customer experience which includes many things outside of the developer agreements. Apple is doing a great job of moderating all the above thus far. -Miten

Joe, thanks for the extensive coverage. Reading the post gave me a complete overview of the proceedings without actually being there. interesting to see a larger focus on privacy - than i have noticed in earlier years.

no San Fran?

Steven: I cannot agree more with your the following sentence: "it’s not that people now tell stories using branching hypertext links: it’s that we actively miss those links when we pick up an old-fashioned book." the interactivity of hypertext is addictive. i often find myself wander off to different threads of thought while reading a book; since my web-browser is sitting right next to me; albeit stimulated by the physical book. makes it terribly hard to power through a book. hoping to try to the kindle soon, perhaps it will bind me to a virtual dictionary & wikipedia - and not let me wander off elsewhere. thanks