Golfers may soon be able to find out exactly how far they've driven off the tee, or how high they've hit a nine-iron, thanks to a tracking technology that stores information on a chip inside the ball.

The chip, which is less than half the size of a phone’s SIM card, works by using satellite technology to measure the exact location of the ball across a given time - including where it has been hit, but also its altitude and speed.

It uses the same GPS technology that is built into the most advanced phones, but because it doesn’t have to process the information immediately it can be much smaller, and cheaper.

Golf is just one of many applications under development. Cameras using the chip, which is made by a British company called Geotate, will for instance be able to record exactly where a photo was taken when they upload it onto their computer, meaning that all the pictures from a given trip can be plotted on a map.

All manner of sporting equipment could also incorporate the chip, using it to gather information about how far a person has run, how long a passage of play has taken, what altitude a cyclist has reached. That data could in turn be cross-checked against heart rate information, or the pace of a sprinter’s acceleration.

"Eventually we're going to get to a point where every device is location-aware," Chris Marshall, chief technology officer of Geotate, which is based in Reigate, Surrey, said. The first 'geo-accessories' - which Times Online understands will be made by Philips - will go on sale at the end of the year, and will take the form of thin discs measuring a couple of centimetres in diameter that a person can carry with them. They may even by embedded in clothing.

When a particular activity - a jog, say - is finished, the owner will then upload the information that has been stored by the GPS receiver in the chip onto the computer and, using software that comes with the device, find out where he or she has been (and how quickly). The 'geo-information' is displayed either on a map or in graphical format.

Trials are already in place with several of the major electronics manufacturers to have the technology built into digital cameras, Mr Marshall said at the Where 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

GPS - or satellite-based - technology has been used in consumer devices for several years, but typically it has provided navigation services, which require information gathered by the GPS receiver to be processed 'in real time' - in order to tell the driver which way to turn as the car moves along a road, for instance.

That type of service requires a significant amount of processing and therefore battery power. What Geotate realised was that there were potentially dozens of GPS-based applications which did not require real-time information processing - for instance a tourist being able to 'geo-tag' his or her photos when they are loaded onto a computer.

As long as a radio receiver could record a GPS signal at given intervals, a memory component that could store the signal, and a small battery, the cost and size of a GPS device could be reduced dramatically. Geotate's smallest chips, which cost about $4 and measure 1cm by 0.5cm, use about 10 millijoules each time they take a 'geo-measurement' - about the same amount of energy used to power a 60W light bulb for one six thousandth of a second.

Geotate said that depending on the use the chips were put to, they could last for months before needing to be recharged.

The company, which has more than ten patents for its chip, has 30 employees, including 25 in the UK, and is backed by the Road Group, an investment firm focused on location-based services.

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