ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how questions of location have become a central part of experiences of an expanding suite of smartphone applications and services and a necessary part of the technological developments and corporate arrangements that underpin them. It argues that the need for thorough, robust and nuanced accounts of 'geomedia' has become urgent by given the complexity of these developments. The chapter provides a brief account of key scholarship – particularly by Scott McQuire, Jesper Falkheimer and Andre Jansson, and Paul C. Adams – that seeks to examine the creative coming together of media and communication and geography. A number of these texts appeared at the time of significant technological change that, among other things, fed the rise of location-based services. The chapter describes three generations of these location-based services, with specific attention given to two of them: Banjo and Foursquare. It relates these developments back once more to Scott McQuire's account of the concept of geomedia.
