Advances in mobile phone technology has been occurring rapidly, despite some of the best efforts of the carriers. After all, if it was up to them, we would all be paying $0.10 to send a 160 character SMS text message vs. downloading and watching YouTube videos for free. It does not pay to be a dumb pipe.

Sprint has been really difficult about opening their network to developers who want to build location-based services. In the recent past, they charged $5000 for access to their location SDKs. More recently, they have been working with third parties to give developers controlled access to the end customer’s location.

According to some informal testing run and reported by developers who attended last week’s Informal Android Developer Meetup, the Sprint-based Android smartphones are not providing location info from the carrier network. Fortunately, developers can still get the location info from the phone’s built-in GPS chipset. Given this alternative way to get location that is not dependent on the carrier, it is confusing as to why Sprint still has not opened their system more.

In related news, Sprint is adding more third party location providers to their network with its addition of technology from TechnoCom Corp. Just what developers need, more fragmentation.

I received an offer to publish ads through a tourist agency. Nothing unusual there, but they did have a new service that I had never seen offered before. Below is a quote from the agencies marketing literature. (I am not going to mention the agency’s name to protect the non-technical in their marketing department.)

Mobile Tag

Half and Full Page advertisers: link your ad to a mobile tag and instantly interact with our readers! Use this platform to transform and promote your unique offer, incentive or feature.

What is a Mobile Tag?

Microsoft Mobile Tags are small, colorful codes that connect your print ad to the digital world. Users with Internet-enabled camera phones can simply snap the Tag on your ad and instantly receive additional information about your product. Reporting is available 24/7 to track the number of scans your tag is receiving!

Microsoft has done it again. Despite dozens of different organizations coming together to create an open source and/or free option with QR codes, Microsoft ignores the standards and creates their own version that is free-for-now but exclusively owned by them. Travelers to Asia and Europe are already familiar with “mobile tags”, better known to geeks as QR codes. These codes are being heavily pushed by Google with the Android OS.

As Allen Stern points out, the biggest problems with Microsoft’s Mobile Tags, besides ignoring what the rest of the industry is already doing, is that it transforms the 2D QR-code-like grid into a colorful mess of triangles. While the QR code can be easily printed in black and white, the red, yellow and green triangles of Microsoft’s mess will require 4-color printing. This is no small deal for companies since it represents an increase in cost.

SV Android Developer Meetup held a competition for its members to vote on what were their favorite Android Apps. Geogad’s Tour app was honored as the second most favorite app. Thanks for the support and the votes of appreciation. It is nice to know that Geogad’s app is so highly prized.

Be assured that we will keep up improving the app and Geogad’s entire travel content platform to provide the best services for all travelers.

As always, let us know what you think about Geogad’s services, especially its Android-based application.

Google has announced the winners of its Android Developer Competition 2. Check out the winning apps. For the Android developers reading this post, start planning your next Android apps!

Several carriers and in-flight WiFi companies are promoting their “Internet in a plane” service. Even Google is getting onboard (pun intended) by sponsoring free WiFi over the holiday travel season within airports and has inked a deal with Virgin American to provide free WiFi on their flights. Of course, Google has deep pockets and makes money when people use the Internet. The deal has the added benefit that they get to advertise with new Chrome browser. But besides Google, can anyone really afford in-flight WiFi?

As reported by Portolio.com, it costs between $100K to $250K to equip just one plane with the equipment needed for in-flight WiFi. To equip an entire airline of hundreds of planes requires more upfront cash than these in-flight WiFi startup companies have and can possibly raise. (Brother, can you spare a quarter billion?)

The biggest problem is that users have been conditioned to expect the Internet for free. (I often joke that “Internet” is Latin for free.) They don’t even want to pay $1 for this service. And even if they would pay $10 per session, a huge sum for most bargain travelers, it would require 10k to 25k customers on a single plane just to pay for the equipment costs for that plane. This does not even include the cost of maintaining the system over time.

It will require years just to get the upfront costs back. How can these in-flight WiFi companies really afford this? But more importantly, is this just too soon for this service? Should we wait for equipment costs to come down more as users become more connected? I am sure that there are other ways to invest this quarter billion that can get a higher and faster return for their investors and a better social return for the world.