Read about a brilliant way to combine location-based apps and customer rewards and brand marketing. Yesterday, Loopt and Virgin America rewarded users who checked in at the SF or Cancun International Airports between the hours of 11AM to 3PM PST with 2 for 1 tickets to Cancun. The only problem was that I did not hear about it until it was far to late. Bummer!

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.

Just when you think that the world is collectively moving in a more digital wireless direction, you get a reminder that everyone has different definitions of progress. Despite all the great advances for GPS based systems, including having 10% of all iPhone apps using the Location API, some governments simply don’t trust that sort of knowledge to their people.

It turns out that Egypt will not allow its people to have GPS location devices such as a GPS enabled phone unless they have a license from the government. Now the people are smuggling in their smart phones. Bizarre. The sad part is that a GPS guided tour of popular tourist destinations in Egypt would be so cool. Hopefully, Egypt will notice that as part of the anti-GPS club, it now has lots in common with the other two countries that ban their citizens from having GPS devices, North Korea and Syria. Yeah, that will look great on the tourist literature.

Last week, the SF mobile community dropped whatever they were doing and headed off to CTIA Wireless. The conference officially covers 4 days, if you include a day of preshow telecom university classes. But it is jammed packed with other sessions and parties. In addition to meetings and networking, I spent time at Location 2.0 and Mobile Jam. I recommend both highly.

Location 2.0 is sponsored by SiRF and others. Its focus is on mobile location and tracking. What I did not realize until I got there was that it included a pitch session for startups to discuss their take on location for the mobile device. Next time, Geogad will be entered for this competition. The big winner was DialDirections. Congratuations.

The Mobile Jam was held the last day of the conference. This was more of an unconference, free-flow event. This really attracted the hard core mobile people and/or the local mobile people. The highlight of the session was the announcement of a new mobile app platform from T-Mobile. It is designed to get mobile apps before the end customer with fewer headaches for both the carrier and the developer. The key is that T-Mobile seems to realize that they have trained the end user to call their support lines with all of their questions. This behavior is costly for the carrier and frustrating to the end customer and the developer. The new model going forward will be that the customer will realize that they need to call the app developer with any problems that they might have.

Gee, it sounds like the regular Internet and PC environment. Finally!

What a difference a year of experience makes. The public safety groups that were pushing for exacting standards for locating users are realizing that there is only so much the technology can do at this stage. There is no surprise that cell phones are harder to locate inside buildings and in rural areas. But now they are starting to realize that the best solution for everyone at this stage is to let some phone companies get some waivers in areas where the geography makes location especially difficult.

With the relaxing of the standards, the FCC is officially letting the issue slide. But it is only temporary. A solution still needs to be found, especially since so many people use their cell phones so much of the time.

For this first generation system, this is really the best solution. There is no point in spending huge amounts of money to locate users in places where few users ever go. It will allow the money that could have gone into such a system to be deployed elsewhere in the network to improve features for more users.