The following is a guest contribution by Rip Gerber, Founder, President & CEO of Locaid.

The biggest consumer brands are fattening up their marketing budgets and adding LBS. Not pounds, but Location–Based Services (LBS). The possibilities for LBS go way beyond check-ins and store finders. Location is becoming an integral driver of any mobile campaign.

Why? Location-based advertising lifts response rates with relevancy. That’s why the mobile ad networks are boasting 5x lifts in CPMs when a lat/long turns a campaign into high click-through rates. Expect to pay hefty premiums for location-based ads over the next three years.

Should you pay to play in LBS?

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Fresh from its acquisition of TweetDeck, Twitter apparently has another surprise in its social media bag of tricks.

In the microblogging platform’s ongoing effort to regain some of the market share lost to competing third-party Twitter platforms, the company is believed to be planning a new integrated photo-sharing service to take on the likes of Twitpic, Flickr, and others.

Sources speaking with TechCrunch reveal that Twitter could announce the service as early as this week. As a result, all eyes are now turning to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, who is set to speak tomorrow at the D9 conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.

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Where, Inc., an LBS startup that has a few mobile apps already available, has been awarded a patent for its unique geofencing technology.

Patent number 7,848,765 was issued on Dec. 7th, more than five years after it was originally filed in May of 2005.  It details the company’s method and systems for “geofencing and the associated delivery of applications, content and mobile coupons.”  In relation to how the technology works for Where, the language in the patent describes it as:

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