Lots of the news coming from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain this week seems to be focused on social networking and converged devices. We've posted a few of the LBS announcements at LBS360.NET.

More predictions on the market size of location-based services is coming from Gartner this time:

"Worldwide subscribers to location-based communications services on mobile devices will increase by nearly 168 per cent in 2008 while revenue will grow by 169 per cent, according to Gartner, Inc. Location-based service technologies have been around for several years but they have not experienced the rate of success that was anticipated at the beginning,” said Annette Zimmermann, a research analyst at Gartner. “The market for location-based services is at a turning point, with indications of mainstream adoption in the next two to five years.”

Now, I don't know where Gartner has been looking for the last year but the turning point was back in late 2006 when PND's took off leading to more subscribers for phone-based apps in 2007.

Gartner said the number of subscribers worldwide will rise from 16 million in 2007 to 43.2 million in 2008 and revenue will rise from $485.1 million in 2007 to $1,307.3 million in 2008. The number of subscribers is expected to reach nearly 300 million in 2011 and revenue is forecast to top $8 billion in 2011.

Every time a new company adopts Google as a mapping interface is not cause for yet another blog post. I just found this one intriguing: Calix, a company that delivers solutions to the telecommunication industry specifically for network management, has chosen Google as its mapping interface to its Calix Management System. Usually, when I think of telecommunication network management I think of GE, Telecordia, Telvent, etc. and these vendors have chosen solutions from Oracle or ESRI. Now, I don't know if Calix doesn't need much mapping and therefore chose Google, but their statement within the press release notes otherwise: "Unlike virtually all other element management system topology-management functions, which rely on static maps or geographic information systems (GIS), Google Maps for Enterprise provides a rich, interactive interface that includes panning, zooming, satellite images and street-level views (in certain locations)." Is this another datapoint for "the Googling of GIS" or simply a need for simple map rendering within the context of simple data display needs. But Calix is touting topology management as one of their core capabilities and it is strange to see Google and topology in the same context.