A busy day for mobile in Silicon Valley: WCA and IEEE-CES

It's a busy day for discussions of new mobile technology here in Silicon Valley - from applications of location based services to semiconductors.

At 3:30 this afternoon, I'll be heading up to Palo Alto for the Wireless Communication Alliance's LBS SIG presentation of Locationpolooza! The event is described as an opportunity for the "best and brightest" location applications to show why users should be excited about downloading them. 

I have not used any of these apps myself, so I'll be interested to hear about the offerings from these presenters:

1. Skout -using location information to help find other nearby "singles" for flirting, chatting and potential dates. (In case my wife is reading.. I won't be using this one myself ;-)
2. Geodelic - looks like a personalized Yelp, combining location information with a personal preference profile to filter searches of nearby places of interest.
3. MotiveCast - the website shows a company in stealth mode, but I did find a YouTube video that said something about "motivating purchase behavior". There is also an online job listing for an Android developer to work on "the intersection of mobile gaming and augmented reality"
4.  CiviGuard – a platform for crisis communications, targeted at local government emergency management agencies.
5. ZOS – a platform to create an "industry standard for communicating location information in the Location-Based Service (LBS) ecosystem".

From the WCA meeting, I'll immediately be going to the Santa Clara Valley IEEE Consumer Electronics Society meeting on Serial Port Memory Technology (SPMT). SPMT is a "new memory interface standard for mobile and consumer electronics devices".  The technology is being developed by a consortium of companies, including ARM, Hynix, LG, Marvell, Samsung, and Silicon Image. SPMT is intended to address the need for higher bandwidth, low power memory. This was one of the challenges described by Greg Delagi, Senior VP at Texas Instrument, during his keynote at the International Solid State Circuits Conference earlier this year.

It should be an interesting set of discussions. Watch this space for a follow-up report.