Recently, I discovered a great blog authored by Michael Myser, who is a freelance writer who loves the world of sports and high-tech.  I must say that these two passions are shared by quite a few other fellow telecom analysts (albeit, unlike Om Malik, who loves the Yankees, I am a die-hard Blue Jays fan).  Michael was able to parlay his two passions in an interesting article he wrote for Wired earlier this spring.

The article discusses some of the R&D progresses that were made by some baseball equipment manufacturers, including:

What is fascinating about this story is that some of these innovations can actually help out the players to perform better on the field.  With the Bionic Glove, players lose only 10% of their grip strength, as opposed to the usual 20%.  David Ortiz (the Red Sox slugger) used the Bionic Glove last year.

Microsoft and Sprint are teaming up to introduce a wireless location based service geared towards helping businesses locate, track and direct mobile workers through the use of text and voice messaging.  The service is expected to be available across all of the US and is part of the Sprint Business Mobility Framework, which is being introduced after recent successes with some target customers over the past few months. 

Sprint will rely on Microsoft's Map Point Location Server (MLS), which can do a lot more than just mapping and routing information from the MapPoint Web Service.  The MLS software also can perform real-time tracking and management of highly mobile employees (such as "road warriors") or vehicle fleets.  This requires a partnership with a service provider and Sprint represents the first US operator to sign on.  Last year, there were many similar deals announced with service providers in Sweden and the UK.  Closer to home, Bell Canada was the first carrier to provide the service, in a deal announced last year.

Location and presence definitely are part of a recipe for a potential killer app: the possibilities are endless. Imagine an end-user getting pushed with some information when he/she is at a mall, being able to find out a movie is playing in that complex, and then finding out a person from his/her buddy list happens to be there as well, and can receive an SMS invitation to watch the movie together.  The IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) framework can be instrumental in allowing service providers to start experimenting with these so-called "combinational services".  Therefore, expect location based services to get more and more sophisticated in the future.