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Top2. Geolocation: A Growing Opportunity
The business environment of the 21st century is accelerating more and more. The consolidation of the internet as the most important shaping force in the business world has generated new business opportunities, changing traditional patterns and the speed at which decisions must be taken.
Our purpose is to show the opportunities for entrepreneurship in the field of information technology, focusing on geolocation systems. These opportunities require: a) the use of internet along with other technologies that enable wireless connectivity (such as wifi, Bluetooth...), b) a real-time positioning (GPS), and c) the expansion and dissemination of these technologies (mainly through mobile phones) in all countries and all levels of the population.
The antecedents to the use of geolocation systems are located in the first websites that adopted geocoding or geotagging features (the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as photographs, video, websites, or RSS feeds) like Google Maps or photo-sharing communities such as Flickr or Panoramio. In this sense, YouTube staked in July 2007 for this technology, upgrading the service to facilitate geotagging capability. Since then, Google Earth users can choose a specific location on the planet and watch the videos related. But it is actually since 2008 when expanded geolocation technologies –including cell tower localization– have become available, and devices such as digital cameras and camera phones have integrated features such as Wi-Fi connectivity and GPS navigation into more sophisticated capabilities such as auto-geotagging.
Although the location capabilities were incorporated into mobile phones in 2000, the great turning point was determined by the appearance in the market of iPhone, which provided the users with a technology with many friendly location functions (mapping software, Flixster for showing schedules and reviews of movies, etc.). Since the inclusion of these geolocation features in the iPhone OS 1.1.3, which complemented the cell tower location technology with positioning systems Wi-Fi and Skyhook Wireless-Assisted GPS (iPhone 3G), there was exponential proliferation of location-based applications.
The main objective of this paper is to show how the effective channeling of the available information would place decision making at different levels and regarding different concerns of today's society, connecting so the online world of Internet with the physical world. Of the many possibilities of combined use of geolocation information in the network, the most important one will be described in this paper.