I agree with you – help us solve the common problems. Find us parking places, the nearest ATM for my bank (without having to tell the system every time which bank I use), and the best prices for gasoline nearby. There aren’t many open standards yet, and the history of technology shows this will take a while. However, companies are tracking their fleets over time and working to reduce costs by analyzing that data.

I think the device-agnostic, carrier-agnostic middleware that is coming out this year – the ability to run your own location based widget software on any GPS phone/device independent of the carrier, is a step in the right direction. That way you can track the vehicle’s location over say the past few months, and build your own company databases, along with other devices such as mobiles. No being locked into one telco carrier, one handset and one piece of software. And add other widgets or build additional databases and services as time goes on. Companies such as mobiles2go.com are definitely on the right track.

And anyone who can provide me with a real service, will get my vote. Such as how to find your car in the department store parking lot, using your mobile phone’s WAP maps only you put down the mobile somewhere but can’t remember where, probably next to the keys which have also disappeared. I often have days like that.