Geo-location tech on the mobile tagged campus

School supplies for millennials: 1 GPS-ready supersmartphone. Harvard is on Foursquare and Mark Zuckerberg is not far behind his old stomping ground, as Facebook is poised to launch a GPS status update extension.

Early-adopters at Harvard are not the first campus to get all geo-loco: that honor belongs to UNC Charlotte, first out of the gate in North America to offer cross-campus Foursquare co-promotions in November 2009 (video interview here with the truly visionary Director of IT Business Services at UNC Charlotte).

So will the digital natives on campus this fall flock to location-aware social networking? According to Mashable’s Pete Cashmore* the cool factor of location-aware apps and devices lies in “the serendipity of realizing that your best friend is in a bar two blocks away, or multiple check-ins at a single location suggesting that’s the place to be on a particular night.”

Sounds like fun, but there is a catch—you can’t just use any old cellphone. You need to fork over the cash for a snazzy superphone (to borrow a phrase from Google) and dataplan (and not just any smartphone will do). According to a totally unscientific poll I did over the last month:  ask a dozen mobile-using, facebook-fanatic, twittering, digitally-savvy GenYs near you if they Foursquare and you’ll find that something like half of them don’t have a smart-enough GPS- and web-enable device and service plan required to join in the geo-loco SNS craze.

While it’s true that upwards of 80% of young people in North America have mobile phones, less than 25% of the entire mobile telephone sales (in US/Canada) represents smartphones. Globally, according to technology analyst Gartner, just 172.4 million of the 1.211 billion mobile handsets sold in 2009 were smartphones—and even then, not all “smart” devices are Latitude-, Gowalla-, or Foursquare-ready.

Of course this will change quickly if and when the Facebook GPS statversation trend catches on–a development likely to accelerate the pace toward a tipping point in mobile millennial smartphone adoption. Although criticized by some in the industry as exaggerated and premature, Juniper Research published a report in February forecasting the market for location-based services will bring in revenues of more than $12.7 billion by 2014.

Back on campus, ivy leaguers can vie to be 4sq mayor of UNC or Harvard’s halls and haunts—and of course the trend is catching on across campuses—these two institutions are unique for their “official” adoption and co-promotion.

Also on board are the tech-forward area merchants in Boston and Charlotte who are no doubt quickly erecting their own geofencing. How many campuses beyond Harvard are poised to follow UNC Charlotte’s lead? For advertisers and recruiters offering campus tours the potential is exciting, but what about for educators—can profs do some game-mods to retrofit these GPS SNS apps to support learning? Since so many schools are already engaged in mLearning, we’re sure to see examples of geo-loco socnetting in higher ed courses this fall.

* Thank u @carlosmonteiro for tweeting the Cashmore interview.