Messaging services that communicate your current location, thoughts, mood, etc…are soooo yesterday!

Granted, we require services that tell us how things are (weather, news); where things are (maps, directions); and what everyone we know is up to (Twitter, Buddyping and a slew of social networking apps). However, my take from a string of conferences and speaking engagements – industry events that covered topics ranging from social media to location services, and exposed me to super-cool companies just coming out of stealth mode in the process — is that the real revenue may be in providing services that connect the dots in our daily routines to help us manage our lives and express our intentions.

Put simply, mashups between location (GPS, for example), calendars, address books and a host of other tools and technologies make it possible to create services that transcend the present tense to focus on future possibilities. Clever companies are combining phone features with personalization and pattern recognition to introduce services that are more intelligent and more resourceful than anything we’ve seen before.

Take Proxpro Prompt, a GPS service in beta that fuses the mobile device’s digital calendar with GPS to tell users exactly when they have to leave to make the next appointment based on a real-time understanding of traffic conditions and related factors. By integrating GPS with the calendar, Proxpro compares current location with the time and location of the user’s next appointment, and 30 minutes before the best departure time a “when to leave” alert pops up automatically on the user’s mobile device. A map displays the fastest route and the current traffic conditions.

Need to catch a flight or make a train? Installing Prompt on a mobile device turns the phone into a personal planning device. It can collect and weigh all the variables (traffic, weather, etc…) to determine when you should leave and how you should travel. The application, currently only available in North America and on BlackBerry 8800 or Curve devices, is creating quite a buzz, and Julian Bourne, Proxpro CEO, tells me the downloads – several thousand in the first week – continue to exceed his expectations.

During a session I moderated on mobile location services at Navigation & Location Europe 2008 in Amsterdam, I conducted an informal poll and asked my panel, as well as the wider audience, if they would want – or more importantly – be willing to pay for location-enabled, situation-aware messaging services like Prompt.

The vast majority, many already unnerved by the commute to the venue and worried about catching their flight back, responded they would gladly subscribe. In fact, many wondered why we don’t have those services now. After all, the utility is obvious and the value prop is easy to communicate.

You could hear a “click” as PND vendors and mobile operators thought this through. If prosumers would pay, then busy consumers (the spread from students to soccer moms) might even be willing to accept mobile advertising.

At the other end of the spectrum, and this time at Mobile Europe 2.0 in Barcelona, I had the pleasure of meeting Richard von Kaufmann, Creative Director of Zipipop, a Finnish company making serious waves with its Zipiko offer. A mashup of presence, location, calendar, time and address book (to name a few), this service is designed from the ground up to help us manage our social life on the go. The demo, which convinced the audience to vote it the best of the Early Stage Start-Up session, showed us how this service helps us reach out to friends, communicate our (future) plans, and close the loop by arranging and confirming the meet-up.

Look beneath the hood and the service is really about enabling what Richard calls intention broadcasting. Sitting at what I’ll call the intersection of communication and coordination, intention broadcasting tells people (you want to tell) what you plan to do next. As Richard put it on the company blog, it’s like status messaging but “with the emphasis on the future.” Consider the scenarios and the monetization schemes that can arise when users communicate their intentions freely and invite a direct response.

With this in mind, I recently caught up with Richard to discuss the impact I’m sure his company will have on our daily lives and explore what this all means to the future of the Web.

In his view, and I share it, we are moving another giant step in the continuum. We started the adventure with communication (PC, mobile and a range of devices that combine the two) and have just recently begun to navigate the terrain that connects our conversations via new forms of collaboration (social media, online communities, mobile social networks and all the spaces in-between). Now we are taking the first exciting steps in the direction of coordination, using the tools and technologies at our disposal to create a new and vastly more pragmatic Web.

It’s early days, but services like Prompt and Zipiko change the rules. It’s no longer just about connecting people; it’s about connecting features and functionality to create a long tail of services capable of helping us make a better judgment about future events and experiences - if not predict them.

If you know of other mobile services, or wish to discuss the path that leads us to a more pragmatic Web, then I invite your comments. Richard has since agreed to a podcast to discuss Zipipop’s big-picture view of the market and future roadmap on my own site, MsearchGroove, so I encourage you to check it out.