I believe that all mobile strategies will soon have a location component.  When that happens, “location” appended to “mobile” will become redundant, like saying an electric computer.

But we’re not there yet. In the meantime, I talk to a lot of people who want to develop differentiating location-based capabilities in their mobile strategy.  Many of those people find the array of names and sub-categories of technologies confusing.

In trying to explain the ecosystem one morning, I drew it out on the placemat at the University Cafe in Palo Alto (I know…typical!).  It seemed helpful so I redid it as a presentation.  I have subsequently shown it to several folks in the mobile and location world.  While it is simplistic, it is a good starting point to categorize the various players.  I added a few examples and caveats and posted it in Slideshare.  A link is below:

There is nothing particularly special about the two examples but they were illustrative of the self-sufficient model and a partnership model. If you’d like to show the model for another market example, send it to me and I can add them.

I hope this can be a living document and as such, have licensed it under Creative Commons.  You are free to use it under a share-alike and attribution license.  I’d appreciate any feedback or improvements.