Random Thoughts 
After a long time of blog silence I thought it's time for a new entry.
I had this idea some months ago (and still haven't tried this in code ...).
I thought about creating a "Do it yourself" location based service.
The idea is that many mobile operators have mobile portals which bring services like "find the nearest drugstore" which are based on LBS. For example T-Mobile Germany has this service in their "T-Zones" portal.
If you use that it will show you your current location (an address) before showing you the nearest drugstores.
It should be easy to send an similar http request to the drugstore finder and read the response. Then you have an address.
Then you could use a service like multimap.com to find the geo coordinates and you're done. I recently thought about implementing this and creating a JSR179 implementation on top of this. The only drawback would be that it depends a lot on your mobile service provider.
It's a little bit cumbersome but I think it works and it's the cheapest way to create a location based service with J2ME (or Java ME - that's the new brand name).
But I still don't know what kind of LBS I could do then. One could create a cool cellspotting application which doesn't require a GPS receiver. That could be fun.
