According to their 2005 patent filing, Google may be interested in providing information to people’s mobile phones based on their location:
“The generating of the dictionary data may also include producing data related to the information indicative of the user location. The generated dictionary data may be associated with places near the user location. Also, the generated dictionary data may be associated with common query data from users near the user location, and may be provided to the remote device in response to a request from the remote device.”
In theory, this could include “consumer BI” queries such as:
- “the three closest restaurants with a Zagat’s rating of over 16”
- “the closest gas station with below-average price per gallon”
- “a dentist within 10 miles that has no complaints on the web”
From a business point of view, an area sales manager could automatically be provided with the latest figures for a customer or sales office as soon as they got within a certain distance of that location.
[UPDATE: it looks like this is happening. More on Google’s plans in this article]