Location aware applications have been around for some time and are, as their name suggests, simply applications that run on Smartphones or computers that are aware of their geographical location. Until recently their uses have been limited to satellite navigation systems and fairly nerdy geocaching treasure hunts, but last year this changed.

First came Foursquare, a peculiar social media app that rewarded users for exploring their neighbourhoods. On the face of it rather nerdy but it became very popular. Small businesses in the USA quickly realised its potential by starting to offer promotional food and drinks for customers that visited their bars multiple times. Sadly the accuracy was a little questionable though, and people began to cheat by simply walking past. Then came Gowalla, which took things one stage further.

Gowalla instead treated everything as more of a geocaching scavenger hunt. "Trips" were created and allowed you to "check-in" at various places, receive points and collect "stamps", "icons", and "pins of glory". Gowalla's geographical positioning engine was far more precise than Foursquare's, and led to some bars in the USA to offer incentives for completing their pub crawls.

Gowalla and Foursquare have proved to be very popular with Smartphone users, but this is really just the beginning. Kidspotter already allows parents to track their child's precise movements at amusement parks but it could go far further; the technology is there for some stunning potential location aware applications with real business uses and 2010 is surely when they will be developed.

On a simple level businesses could insist company phones be location aware. Managers could know at any point in time where their employees are, so never again would a delivery van or estate agent be lost if a quick call to the office meant a colleague could pinpoint their position and help. Sick days spent on the beach could also be a thing of the past.

Taking the idea one stage further, calendar applications like Outlook could learn your journey trends and recommend you leave for your meeting thirty minutes early because there's traffic on the M25. For those that regularly need to connect to the office from home, security could be simplified by being location based rather than having to remember complicated usernames and passwords.

B2C (Business to Consumer) businesses could learn from the Gowalla concept and build customer interaction and loyalty by creating their own promotional treasure hunts. I'm sure there will be plenty of promotional Easter egg hunts this year.

For those with larger infrastructures, the potential quantity of information gathered is staggering. Already larger logistics firms can store location data over a long period of time and analyse it to spot general inefficiencies, such as wasted journeys and poor routes. Soon this could be available to smaller logistics firms and anyone with a reasonable supply chain via cheap software packages.

Assuming personal privacy could be assured, then anonymous location data could prove incredibly valuable. It could be used to help draft the design of large scale building projects such as airports, shopping centres and stadiums to make them more efficient and safe where there's high foot flow.

That however perfectly illustrates the main problem with location aware applications; privacy. Put simply, many people just don't want someone, least of all a business, to know where they are all the time. Gowalla and Foursquare have proved that this doesn't concern many people, and so all I hope is that privacy concerns don't compromise the development of location aware technology.

Even if the technology is not developed further and mostly forgotten, at least your Smartphone will smugly detect and change time zones when you walk off a plane.

Joshua Geake is the founder of GeakeIT.co.uk and IT & Web Manager of BrightMinds.co.uk. He is an expert in IT solutions and online technology and has given talks on email marketing campaigns and how best to achieve your online goals on a tight budget.