Many of you following the Entropy Digital blog have undoubtedly heard me wax (incessantly) about visionaries Gerd Leonhard and Umair Haque – two influential strategists and ‘futurists’ who firmly understand the evolving impact of media and technology in the 2009 world and beyond. Other ‘paperback bestseller’ pundits we regular hear mentioned in Twitter forwards and blog posts include Jeff Jarvis of What Would Google Do? fame, and of course Chris Anderson (The Long Tail/Free) of Wired Magazine.

Curiously however the name Don Tapscott (co-author of Wikinomics and Growing Up Digital) doesn’t carry the same gravitas – the same ‘Tweetmeme’ value – across the blogosphere or amongst strategists and technology consultants. It’s truly a shame, as a recent talk at VINT, the International Research Institute of Sogeti, aptly entitled Rebuilding the World showcases, Tapscott should be heard (and in this case, heard for the entire 60-minute video featured below). Trust me, it’s worth your time.

A few essential excerpts the following keynote relates (in case you’re in a hurry):

“The global economic crisis is a wakeup call to the world: we need to rethink and rebuild many of the organizations and institutions that have served us well for decades, but now have come to the end of their life cycle. The financial services industry, for example, does not just need fresh infusion of capital or some new regulations; it needs a whole new operating model — one based on transparency, sharing of intellectual property and global governance.

So while the burning of the global economic platform is propelling change, simultaneously the digital revolution is driving new opportunities and a new generation of digital natives is entering the workforce, people who think differently and bring a new and much-needed set of skills to our problems.”

Please enjoy the following lecture (thanks as always to Gerd Leonhard for the heads up. BTW, if you don’t follow this guy on Twitter, you should!)

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/5727784[/vimeo]

Having worked within the highly excitable and sometimes neurotic ‘mobile’ industry since the late 90′s and bearing witness to the evolution of a number of wireless trends (from the fabled WAP site to ringtones, ring-back tones (?), bluejacking and the unexplainable phenomenon of selling mobile phone wallpaper for £4.50 each) throughout it all, the phrase ‘LBS’ has survived the lot.

I first heard the phrase ‘LBS’ way back in 1997 while working in online advertising for Microsoft’s Developer Tools Division. These mythical ‘location-based services’ would allow us to target cellphone advertising to a ‘developer type’  presumably ambling past a PC World where a magical voucher for the latest Visual Studio upgrade could appear on his Nokia or Ericsson R380 (remember them?). Or so we thought. In actuality, the term LBS has been used as simply a meeting ‘carrot’ with little pay-off. Hey, we’re all to blame. Who here hasn’t put the phrase Location Services in the “Next Steps” section of a PowerPoint presentation sometime in the past 10 years? Let he who is without sin…

To be honest, back then I had no idea how LBS even worked – though I made a pretty good show of it to Microsoft. I would venture to bet few of us actually did – having been told a ‘theory’ that Operators had cellular triangulation down to a science – wielding the awesome ability to send your mother a targeted message on her birthday, locate you next to your favourite Starbucks, and even offer your details to advertisers looking for someone in their mid 20′s who enjoyed baseball, jazz music, and Woody Allen films.

In actuality, back in those dark days of mobile advertising and product development (actually not all that long ago) the truth was a bit of letdown – as Operators contracted with a precious few third-party providers to, at best, decipher which country you were in when you switched on your RAZR V3.

Fast forward now to the age of the iPhone, Palm Pre and Android-powered HTC Hero. With the rise of the smartphone, and subsequent standard GPS features, location services are now mainstream. Sure, the iPhone is a bit annoying with even the camera asking to know your location with every snapshot you take – but the potential is there – it’s real. As Gartner has recently announced, location-based services “are forecast to grow from 41.0 million in 2008 to 95.7 million in 2009 while revenue is anticipated to increase from $998.3 million in 2008 to $2.2 billion in 2009.”

As Mashable’s Ben Parr pointed out in a recent article, emerging products like Google Latitude, Zhing, and Yowza have effectively become the mobile-version of ‘Twitter’ for location. Instead of asking ‘what are you doing’, services are now showing friends ‘where you are doing it’.

And for even basic mobile users, the concept is becoming natural.

Combine location with compass functionality and an entirely new paradigm of augmented reality (AR) has emerged marked with the release of products such as Layar, Wikitude, and Nearest Tube – apps designed to enhance your experience contextually – adding content and information highly targeted to who you are and more crucially, where you are.

So the only question that remains is whether the term ‘LBS’ will now feature in your first few PowerPoint slides rather than the last. Though to be honest, if you want to look good in your next pitch, I would eliminate the antiquated term entirely – as location is finally a given…