I’ve been an avid follower and fan of a company called Akamai for a number of years now. Many people mistakenly view Akamai as merely a video streaming company that helps media companies deliver video on the web, and while this is true, the company delivers a lot more that just video… they deliver all sorts of web traffic/assets to your browser…. Html, flash, images, etc.

When you hire Akamai you’re generally looking to 1. ensure that a user anywhere in the world can load your website quickly while 2. avoiding the unnecessary expense of buying extra servers to be able to handle rare peak traffic periods and a geographically diversified user base.

Akamai provides their service by storing files that make up your web site out on the edges of the network, not one time at a single central server, but with many copies of your site on many severs physically close to the user, maybe just a few miles from your house or office, to minimize network traffic and the latency, problems and congestion that ensues. That sounds like a herculean task, until you learn that approximately 80% of the U.S. population lives in urban areas which make up just 3% of the land area… then it seems a little more doable, although still impressive.

Knowing how Akamai works and the correlation between physical proximity and performance, makes for an interesting questions about the best way to communicate location data about points of interest (POIs) to the nearby users of mobile device that are location aware.

Let me first clarify, err steal from Wikipedia, what the heck a POI is, from Wikipedia it’s “a specific point location that someone may find useful or interesting” . Most people think of things that are always there like businesses, parks and government building, etc that are useful to everyone when talking about POIs. But in my mind POIs also include locations that may be of interest to a select few like a geocache, or only of interest for a two hour window because an event may be happening there, or even just for an instant because some thing of interest passed by that point.

So with POIs that don’t move, are ‘always on’, and are applicable to everyone, here is how it works currently. Let’s say that there is a Wendy’s at the corner of Main St and Maple Avenue, over time the presence of that store gets recorded in the various databases of folks like Acxiom and InfoUSA and then into Navteq, TeleAtlas and on into Google Maps, Y! Maps, and Virtual Earth as well as Garmin and TomTom PNDs for consumers to find. And if the Wendy’s closes or moves, slowly over time the old listing will make its way out of the system after someone drives by or tries to call Wendy’s and notices it is no longer there and updates the database. The biggest problem with the current system for these types of POI’s, is that the information is often static and stale… gathered by an outside observer at a point in time, typically way in the past.

The biggest problem with the current centralized storage system for all other types of POI’s is that it just flat doesn’t work.

So what is the solution? Well what about storing POI location information locally, out at the “edge”, in mobile location aware units at the physical point of interest that can wirelessly broadcast out their presence and details about what they are (a store, event, a bus, a hotdog cart) etc to other nearby mobile location aware devices (ie phones) and cut out the middle man and all the headaches in the process.

I am sure there are a thousand reasons why it would never work, but heck I’d love to start hearing some of them.