Always the innovators, our friends over at Apple seem to have more fun LBS tricks in store… and it looks like you’ll probably literally find them in stores.

The folks at The Register have a detailed piece on an Apple patent that was filed last week covering a broad range of “approaches” for the “display of location specific information” at “pre-determined locations”. The wording “pre determined location” in particular jumped out at me… mostly because these patents usually bend over backwards to be as broad and over reaching as possible, so the inclusion of wording to specifically limit its application seems noteworthy. That and the many reference to ‘establishment specific’ applications paints a picture of a retail store oriented product.

So what kinda “establishment specific” “location specific information” are we talking about here, well from what I can decipher it would seem to include:
- general display panels (aka ads, “welcome to Best Buy, America’s favorite electronics store”)
- ads tied to a specific store ( “This Best Buy store is offering 20% off any albums purchased before noon today)
- ads tied to physical and online store items (“Jimmy Buffet’s new album is out… buy it here, or download it directly to your iPhone for the same price.”)
- ads tied to enhanced online experiences for physical world purchases and items (“don’t take our word for it, visit our online forums to find out what others think of this digital camera”)
- ads tied to public audio broadcast in the store (“like that tune you just heard, it was Viva la Vida by Coldplay buy it here — this is what the album cover looks like — or download it now to your iPhone)

Some of these individual elements we’ve seen before like Shazam which can listen to what music is playing and identify the artist and make it available for download. But what makes it interesting is, looking at it in its entirety with “establishments” and location at the center, it just looks an awful lot like a mobile/location aware version of a good old fashioned web affiliate program ala Commission Junction or Linkshare. You know they ones where links from one site like dogparkusa.com drives sales to another like PetSmart.com… and the referring site dogparkusa.com gets paid a bounty by PetSmart for bringing them a new customer.

It’s the same thing but just throwing in mobile location ‘targeting’… ie an iPhone user from this geographic spot (which happens to be sitting on top of a Best Buy or Starbucks) gets served a relevant contextual ad which converts to a sale on iTunes… and therefore Best Buy or Starbucks gets paid a bounty for having brought Apple a new customer and transaction.

Not unlike what I suspect we will see develop in reverse in search where a mobile digital search results in a physical visit or purchase with the digital search provider receiving compensation for driving that event, all made possible by location awareness of course.