An Apple patent (number 20120131510) for location-based tracking has appeared at the U.S Patent & Trademark Office. According to Apple, location information is used to build a database of locations having associated audio, video, image or text data.

In some implementations, a device includes a touch-sensitive display and collects data associated with a geographic location of interest. The geographic location of interest can be displayed on a map using an indicator. A touch selection of the indicator provides access to the data through an interface displayed on the touch-sensitive display. One or more locations of interest can be displayed and grouped together by an attribute.

The inventors are Scott Forstall, Gregory N. Christy, Robert E. Borchers and Imran A. Chaudhri.

Along the same lines are patents 20120129548 and . The former is for locatioin estimation wherein a current location of a mobile system in a wireless network can be determined by using information provided by a base station in communication with the mobile system. Bharath Narasimha Rao, Madhusudan Chaudhary and Karthik Anantharaman are the inventors.

Patent number 20120129520 for geotagging using location estimation. Per the patent, current location of a mobile system in a wireless network can be determined by using information provided by a base station in communication with the mobile system. The location information can be used to index a GEO Locate Table to determine a list of SIDs to populate an optimized scan list. The optimized scan list being used for system selection. The inventors are the same as for the previous patent.

Also appearing at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office today are Apple patents for:

° A system and related methods for tagging data, especially in the context of a web-based application (patent number 20120131494).

° An invention that includes a display apparatus including an item retention wall defining a cavity, and a suspension member coupled to the item retention wall, wherein the item retention wall is configured to retain an item within the cavity by a retention seal between the item and the item retention wall (patent number 20120125810).

° Systems, methods, and computer readable-media for performing data encryption and decryption using a stream or block cipher with internal random states (patent number 20120124392).

° Systems, methods and computer-readable media to perform data encryption and decryption using a derivation function to obtain a key per page of data in a white-box environment (patent number 20120124366).

° A method for storing electronic data. A first set of electronic data may be copied from a computing device to a capsule. The capsule then may be transferred or located to a location other than that of the computing device (patent number 20120131352).

° A hybrid fast Fourier transform (FFT) combines a prime-factor algorithm (PFA) with a Cooley-Tukey algorithm (patent number 20120131080).