Imagine leaving work on Friday night and checking the traffic on your phone. With a wreck ahead, your phone detects your position and provides navigation around the mishap on local streets. After getting home, a friend text messages with an address of where to meet up in a few minutes. Although not familiar with the area, you capture the address from the text of where to meet up and your phone directs you the entire way.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS), has changed dramatically in the last few years. The most useful and innovative developments are in the mobile area. All of the above, it is possible today with existing technology. Many mobile phones are becoming spatially enabled with integrated GPS receivers.

Personal convenience and navigation are far from the limits of the technology. The tracking abilities of these devices are already starting to be realized. Already providers are offering real time tracking services using these handheld units for easy tracking of employees, parents monitoring their children and even friends trying to keep track of each other. Obviously this is a privacy concern, and is why users must opt-in to such services and on many units the phone must be on with the service enabled.