location

Perhaps you're a hard-charging businessperson who wants clients to know their questions will be answered even if you're on the beach.  Or maybe you're just someone who feels a need to quietly brag about vacationing overseas.  Either way, Google's got you covered with a new "add your location to your signature" Gmail feature.

If you connect the acquisition and investment dots, you wind up following Acuity Mobile to Navteq to Nokia.  And since Acuity deals in mobile marketing, Navteq works with maps, and Nokia's all about cell phones, this could indicate that some pretty big companies are growing more interested in location-based advertising.

Google News has done a decent job of representing big stories, but when it came to local developments, your best bet was often to visit to some poorly designed and infrequently updated site owned by a nearby TV station.  Now that may no longer be the case, as Google News is getting local.

This announcement was determined to find people wherever they were; in different forms, it popped up on the Official Google Blog, the Google LatLong Blog, the Google Mobile Blog, and in a formal press release.  And interestingly enough, the announcement was about Google gaining a sort of location-seeking ability.

If your site is location-specific (www.abcdef.es) then it really isn't a problem but if your domain ended with a .com or a .net or a .org then it is hard for search engines to know your location. Now, ex-Googler Vanessa Fox has post which tells everyone how to Let Google Know The Geographic Location of Your Site.

Forty-two percent of parents with children under age 13 are willing to pay for services that allow them to track their child's location and 26 percent of cell phone owners between the ages of 18 to 24 want mobile social networking applications based on their friend's locations according to a new report from JupiterResearch "Location-Based Services: Where Are You?"

Skyhook Wireless is powering a location-based plugin for users of AOL's AIM service. The Wi-Fi based AIM Location plugin lets users set and share their location with other users who have the plugin.

At the bottom of Dell Computers' home page, there's a pull-down menu you can use to load a version of the home page in the language of your country.