You're on the last day of your Mediterrean holiday, faced with a cavernous storehouse stocked with an imposing selection of wines. Imagine using Google Maps to get directions for a wine from the Piedmont region. Our smartphones can't do that just yet, but the next generation of location chips means they might very soon.

Broadcom Crop. are the leading manufacturers of GPS chips in your smartphone. The company has just announced a powerful new chip that has the ability to determine your location via a range of new sources. In addition to existing GPS, the chip can communicate with a number of indoor wireless sources for greater positioning. It can infer your position by detecting WiFi, NFC and forthcoming Bluetooth Beacons and 5G WiFi access points in the built environment. The chip also integrates with standard smartphone sensors like accelerometers, step counters, gyroscopes, altimeters and magnetometers. All that adds up to inch precise location awareness.

The range of ways this chip can track you is dizzying and disconcerting in equal measure. A range of services from social media check-ins, search, healthcare provision, and even pervasive gaming could be completely transformed when this chip is rolled out. Google has already made moves towards mapping indoor spaces, and location services grow year by year at tech events like SXSW. Ease of use does come at the cost of greater machine surveillance; perhaps this will prove one more reason to switch off more often.