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Updated: A few months ago I speculated that location-based services and the infrastructure they require were headed for a major upswing in 2008. My optimism was based on a sharp increase in the number of mergers and acquisitions taking place in the sector. But lately I’ve been feeling like I may have been too conservative with my outlook for the location-based services revolution.

The main reason is the ubiquitousness of mobile phones; the sheer number of them that get shipped each year guarantees LBS a huge audience. Of course, in order for LBS to be on mobile phones, we need applications, which is where I believe the iPhone plays a vital role. Its large screen and built-in GPS (and now its 3G speeds) enable and encourage truly interesting LBS applications. The subsequent success of independent applications makers — Pelagao and Sense Networks, for instance — will in turn push other platform owners to find interesting LBS applications, too.

Along with the iPhone, some of the newer devices like the LG Vue, the Samsung Instinct and about half a dozen others will serve to radically increase interest in LBS services. That will force the current device makers — namely Garmin and TomTom — to consider opening up their ecosystems to applications that offer more than just maps and traffic services.

As if the rise of cell phones-as-personal navigation devices weren’t enough, Microsoft yesterday announced plans to offer an embedded operating systems for PNDs, aka Windows for GPS devices. Welcome to the first day of the rapid commoditization of the GPS device business. And while it may look like Microsoft’s just trying to get traction for its mapping service, I think this is a bit more disruptive than that. It’s the culmination of the three major technology trends of our times: cheap computing, inevitable connectivity and the easy development of software to put it all to work.

For car makers desperate to add value to their vehicles, Microsoft is providing yet another way to offer a navigation system on the cheap. Beyond the auto market, however, the new operating system is going to prompt dozens of Asian manufacturers to build cheaper PNDs, which will hurt the volumes of the market’s two biggest players quite drastically.

Indeed, Garmin and TomTom need to figure out a way to add more intelligence to their systems. Custom versions of their devices aren’t enough — they need to embrace the concept of connectedness. One way would be to buy Silicon Valley-based Dash Navigation, which has a connected device that puts Internet data to very good use. Here’s what I wrote about them back in December 2007:

The Internet is not just about the browser, but rather it is about data and how one can use it to build clever products. I think Dash, much like Amazon’s Kindle and RCA’s Small Wonder video camera, is part of a movement that is breaking Web 2.0’s browser shackles.

Yesterday, I asked the company if they were worried about Microsoft’s foray. CEO Paul Lego responded to me via email, saying:

“As you know, with the Dash Express we are already delivering all of these kinds of connected features and more in a very integrated way. In fact, with our new API, we have an open platform for the car today…We welcome innovation and look forward to seeing how these features get expressed by other PND vendors, including those that adopt this new Microsoft platform.”

Those are fighting words, but I’m sure even he knows that despite having raised $42 million from well-known VCs, his startup can’t play the hardware game and may need to partner with the bigger device makers. After all, Dash needs to worry about the cell phones-as-PND platforms, too. One way or another, this is going to be a market to watch, one that promises lots of innovation. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

Nokia has placed some big bets on location-based technologies, including buying a handful of companies and making a $8.1 billion bid for Navteq. The company’s vision of the future revolves around making wireless Internet more context aware. In particular, Nokia is betting on applications that, when married to location-based services, are going to keep demand for its S60-based phones growing, a point that it’s likely to trumpet at the S60 Summit in Barcelona later this month.

That may not be enough if Nokia wants to continue being the No. 1 mobile phone maker on the planet. The company sees the mobile phone as a computer and as a result has crammed many awesome hardware features into its devices. Their usability, however, is less than stellar. I’ve had some frustration with Nokia’s S60-based user experience. For instance, while I love the Nokia N95 8GB, it cries out for a simpler and more elegant music player, as well as for a camera interface that isn’t so confusing. What Nokia really needs to do — in addition to adding context awareness to its devices — is to simplify their usability.

The iPhone’s ability to switch seamlessly between Wi-Fi networks and AT&T’s EDGE network with minimal mucking around by the user still remains unmatched. If you’re using one of Nokia’s increasing number of Wi-Fi enabled phones, the experience is the opposite: painful. Unless you permanently set a preference in each individual application, you’re annoyingly prompted to select a network whenever a program tries to access the Internet.

Nokia is still grappling with this problem. The good news is that there’s a fix: Psiloc Connect. Psiloc Connect works by creating a new Access Point on your S60 device. By pointing any application to the Psiloc AP, you can set your preferences so Psiloc will attempt to connect through Wi-Fi, then will try your cellular data connection next, whether it be 3G, EDGE or GPRS. In other words, with Psiloc, you can let the phone choose the fastest data network available. It will set you back about $16, which isn’t cheap — but I think it’s worth owning.

Nokia is uncertain about the future of UMA and may not develop any more dual-band handsets for the standard, according to George Fry, director of technology alignment for the Finnish company. “We’re not seeing use diminishing, but we are seeing deployments level off,” Fry said earlier this week at the Personal Computing and Communications Association meeting.

Fry said that in cases in which an operator such as T-Mobile is trying to fill holes in its coverage without spending more to build out the network, UMA makes sense. But he said he wasn’t aware of any new deployments in the last six months or so. Indeed UMA, a standard that allows for secure hand-off between a cellular and fixed network, has proved somewhat polarizing.

Meanwhile Steve Shaw, associate VP of marketing for Kineto Wireless, notes that UMA is also a key component of femtocells, which are currently en vogue in the telco world. Again, there’s no sense of how wide any sort of femtocell deployment might be, but Shaw, whose company bills itself as the UMA company, isn’t counting the standard out.

While admitting that current UMA deployments requiring dual-mode handsets are few, he points out that Orange does have plans to deploy a dual-band network in the UK, Spain and Poland to augment its program started in France. Maybe UMA will become a useful but limited standard, in a manner similar to the way Infiniband was hyped as a replacement for Fibre Channel and Ethernet, but instead was only adopted by the smaller market for high-performance computing.

Google’s preeminence in Silicon Valley is largely due to its ability to offer advertisers a way to hawk their messages against contextually relevant keywords. The plain-text advertising messages, which aim to peddle everything from broadband connections to litigation services, have worked well enough to make Larry and Sergey mega-billionaires (the current nosebleed-inducing decline not withstanding) of the rarest kind.

If in the first eight years of the 21st century contextual text advertising has proven to be the magic potion, then it is safe to say that the next decade or so is going to be about location-relevant advertising and marketing messages. LBA (location-based advertising) has been talked about in hushed tones for so long that it’s hard not to roll one’s eyes. I have been skeptical for a while, but more recently my opinion has started to change.

Why? Because the mobile phones of today are getting increasingly sophisticated, and are coming to market fitted with geopositioning systems. Every single chip maker catering to the mobile market is rushing to add location-based functionality into their chipsets; it’s something I’ve written about on many occasions.

Sales of mobile devices with integrated GPS are forecast to grow to 720 million units in 2011 from 180 million units in 2007, according to research firm In-Stat. Even if those numbers are just 50 percent accurate, it’s clear that location-based advertising is becoming quite real.

While quite a few companies have started to dabble in this arena, it’s still not clear who is going to be the champion here. Google, for example, is pushing its mobile agenda via Android and deals with phone companies; Yahoo appears to have a coherent strategy (if not execution) as well (for once). And then there are the startups.

One of them, Loopt, has made its plans obvious by partnering with CBS Mobile. The two have embarked on what seems to be an interesting experiment in location-based advertising, according to the New York Times. The reason I call it an experiment is because Loopt is available on Sprint (and its affiliate carriers) and there is a limited number of handsets out in the market that are Loopt-capable. Consumers are likely to see a handful of location-relevant ads pop up on their screens, the Times explains.

However, the bigger story however went unnoticed yesterday. NAVTEQ, the Chicago-based digital map provider that’s in the process of being acquired by Nokia (NOK), has made an equity investment in Greenbelt, Md.-based startup Acuity Mobile, which specializes in mobile location-based advertising delivery. NAVTEQ, which licenses Acuity’s technologies, is pretty high on LBA.

Using Acuity’s EMAP technology, NAVTEQ will enable clients to target consumers with real-time and geographic precision. In turn, consumers will have advertising move with them, as their mobile mapping applications unobtrusively present ads, offers, coupons, or other promotions, based on their opted-in preferences. The ads might feature audio, rich graphics, or calls to action such as routing to the closest advertiser storefront.

With NAVTEQ likely to become part of Nokia, LBA could become part of millions of Nokia phones that ship every year. In other words, Nokia could become a big player in the LBA business going forward.

After all, no marketing message is more effective than subliminal location-based relevance. It’s like going to the movies and realizing that you need to eat candy and popcorn, even though normally you never touch the stuff. In my case, given my weakness for shirts, a coupon offering a 10 percent discount on Thomas Pink shirts while walking around Union Square in San Francisco is pretty likely to result in a sale.

A new report ranking broadband connectivity argues that it’s not how much you have but what you do with it. And according to the Connectivity Scorecard, no one is doing enough. Instead of measuring bandwidth speed or how much people pay to get connected, the report throws that information into the mix with data such as literacy rates, enterprise use and services offered via broadband to deliver two sets of rankings.

One ranking includes industrialized countries (which are dubbed “innovation-driven economies”); the U.S. tops the list as the country taking the most advantage of its broadband, while Japan and Korea (which have higher speeds and a reputation for more services and users) come in at No. 3 and No. 10, respectively. The other ranking focuses on “resource-driven economies” (PC-speak for developing countries.)

Russia tops that list — thanks to its high literacy rates and a large number of mobile users — while India and Nigeria round out the bottom. Props to the list makers for recognizing that different countries have different concerns when it comes to connectivity, and that there’s more to innovation than speed. But the fact that it was commissioned by Nokia Siemens Networks did make me raise an eyebrow.

Microsoft said today that it has acquired online mapping services provider Multimap of the UK, a move it said “will play a significant role in the future growth” of its search business. Multimap will operate as a subsidiary of the Redmond giant, part of the Virtual Earth and Search teams in its Online Services Group. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Mapping has become a hot category. Nokia and other companies have been making a big push in map-based services and applications. As we had noted earlier, Google Maps have proved to be a killer application on the iPhone.

Earlier this morning, market research firm In-Stat released a report entitled “More Than Just Laptops –— Worldwide Hotspots are Impacted by Other Mobile Devices.” They sent out a release full of fluff — and light on facts.

“Service providers are reporting an increased number of sessions originating from devices other than laptops,” says Daryl Schoolar, In-Stat analyst. “Consumer electronic devices, such as cellphones and handheld gaming devices have also added Wi-Fi as a product feature.”

What they are saying seems to be partially true. Using your WiFi-enabled phone, iPhone or some such device, you try to log into the Wi-Fi hotspot — say the T-Mobile HotSpot — except it almost never works. In reality, it’s more like a “give up after trying” scenario.

Or at least that has been my personal experience at some of the paid hotspots. And that’s not just in the U.S., but even on recent trips to Europe and Asia.

The problem is the web-based landing page, which is hard to navigate and use on a small device such as a Nokia (NOK) N95 mobile phone. Sure there are some workarounds, like software from Devicescape, but it is an inexact science. Even the free Wi-Fi hotspots have some sort of password protection that involves going through a web-based login page.

I would go so far as to say that while the device makers have started adding Wi-Fi to their gear, the user experience is still in the pre-historic times. If you feel otherwise, I would love to know, especially if you have tips and tricks to offer.