One Afternoon on the High Street and 167 Messages in my Inbox

Another nice example of what is typically hyped as a standard future scenario for location based services, but in reality would completely backfire, can be found on MobHappy.

The scenario typically has two variants:
a) find me the closest Starbucks. Problem: as outlined in my post below, most of the time most of us move in a familiar environment and therefore will not use this feature.
b) Starbucks sending coupons: I liked this example so far, but have to agree now that this is not feasible, at least when done via SMS. Users would have to opt-in, and even then might perceive a bombardment with coupons as they walk down high street as spam. Apart from that, the advertiser would need to cover the SMS costs, which might quickly eat up any profitmargin of an advertised product.