Bluedot had initially focused its efforts entirely on developing a service that could make mobile payments for toll roads, the idea being that rather than having to install something on your windshield, you could just download an app, allowing persistent location access so whenever you drove through a tollway that had been mapped within the app, you'd make a payment without any friction.
Still it is persistent location tracking as an opt-in service — to power a location-based AR game.
"Persistent Location" (or "Ambient Location") presents a complicated case.
When it comes to the promises of persistent location hyper-awareness, the promises of mobile have largely fallen flat.
Probably the closest most will get to noticing/caring will be the toll persistent location tracking takes on their device battery life.
Unfortunately for Facebook's public image, the elimination of the toggleable, persistent location sharing feature comes just two weeks too late.
At today's Where 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara, researchers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden announced that both the iPhone and 3G iPads are storing a persistent list of locations and timestamps, and have been doing so since iOS 4's release.
Unlike Find My Friends, you're not sharing your location on a persistent basis, and unlike Foursquare, you choose who you share with each time.
It seems that Apple's little persistent tracking cookie, consolidated.db, is likely part of a future patented feature having to do with keeping a persistent, low-power-draw, low-precision location record for stuff like geotagging, "journal" apps, etc.
