Tom Coates took the stage today at ETech to announce the developer availability of Fire Eagle.

Fire Eagle is a location storage service. You tell Fire Eagle where you are, and then Fire Eagle can act as your location broker for other services that might want your location information.

It’s like PayPal for your location.

When I asked Tom to explain what Fire Eagle was he replied, “What got me excited about Fire Eagle was the idea that the Internet might be really interesting if it knew where I was.” The video of his ETech presentation is here:

People have been talking about how the advertising model would change in a location-aware world for years. There are countless scenarios for improving the way marketers can talk to people if they know where they are at a particular moment in time.

Social networking is an obvious winner, as well. If services like Facebook or MySpace knew where your friends were that would certainly create some interesting new ways to interact with people.

Every day tasks could change dramatically, too.

Let’s say you need gas for the car. You pull up the handy local gas ticker on your phone which shows the nearest stations and compares prices.

Then maybe you decide to go for a coffee…Are any of your friends out and about? Ping Fire Eagle. You learn that an ex-girlfriend is at the local cafe around the corner, so you go to Starbucks instead.

Now, not everyone has a GPS or wifi-enabled device. And developers will require a little time before they uncover the best uses for this kind of interaction model. However, there are already a few partners working on neat integrations, like Dopplr, for example. And Erica Sadun already built an iPhone hack that will automatically ping Fire Eagle with your location.

Online media today is less about hosting web sites that push out HTML pages every day. It’s real power is derived from treating media as a service or rather about helping data find data. Fire Eagle is a great model of this world.

Fire Eagle has to be one of the most promising applications to come along in a while, in my opinion.

A big congrats to the Fire Eagle team!

One of the most interesting market directions in recent months in my mind is the way the concept of a location service is evolving. People are using location as a vector to bring information that matters directly to them. A great example of this is Dash.net.

Dash is a GPS device that leverages the activity of its user base and the wider local data pools on the Internet to create a more personalized driving experience. Ricky Montalvo and I interviewed them for the latest Developer Spotlight on YDN Theater:

Of particular note are the ways that Dash pulls in external data sources from places like Yahoo! Pipes. Any geoRSS feed can be used to identify relevant locations near you or near where you’re going directly from the device. They give the example of using a Surfline.com feed built with Pipes to identify surfing hot spots at any given moment. You can drive to Santa Cruz and then decide which beach to hit once you get there.

There are other neat ways to use the collaborative user data such as the traffic feedback loop so that you can choose the fastest route to a destination in real time. And the integration with the Yahoo! Local and the Upcoming APIs make for great discoveries while you’re out and about.

You can also see an early demo of their product which they showed at Web 2.0 Summit in the fall:

The way they’ve opened up a hardware device to take advantage of both the information on the Internet and the behaviors of its customers is really innovative, not to mention very useful, too. I think Dash is going to be one to watch.

Google’s new Local News offering misses the point entirely.

As Chris Tolles points out, Topix.net and others have been doing exactly this for years. Agregating information at the hyperlocal level isn’t just about geotagging information sources. Chris explains why they added forums:

“…there wasn’t enough coverage by the mainstream or the blogosphere…the real opportunity was to become a place for people to publish commentary and stories.”

He shouldn’t worry about Google, though. He should worry more about startups like Outside.in who upped the ante by adding a slightly more social and definitely more organic experience to the idea of aggregating local information.

Yet information aggregation still only dances around the real issue.

People want to know what and who are around them right now.

The first service that really nails how we identify and surface the things that matter to us when and where we want to know about them is going to break ground in a way we’ve never seen before on the Internet.

We’re getting closer and closer to being able to connect the 4 W’s: Who, What, Where and When. But those things aren’t yet connecting to expose value to people.

I think a lot of people are still too focused on how to aggregate and present data to people. They expect people to do the work of knowing what they’re looking for, diving into a web page to find it and then consuming what they’ve worked to find.

There’s a better way. When services start mixing and syndicating useful data from the 4 W vectors then we’ll start seeing information come to people instead.

And there’s no doubt that big money will flow with it.

Dave Winer intuitively noted, “Advertising will get more and more targeted until it disappears, because perfectly targeted advertising is just information. And that’s good!”

I like that vision, but there’s more to it.

When someone connects the way information surfaces for people and the transactions that become possible as a result, a big new world is going to emerge.