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February 13 2012
Lost in a Store? The Lightbulbs Can Beam You an Escape Route
HElloo0OO0! I will show you the way.
Imagine yourself in a department store. You’re lost—alone and stranded somewhere in hosiery. What will you do?! How will you ever find your way to the shoe department? Take a deep breath. Look around you. Are those LED light bulbs on the ceiling? Take out your smart phone, raise the camera so it can see the bulb, and pray that you’re right.
Yes! The LEDs are sending location information to your phone, which, via a newly developed indoor navigation app called ByteLight, provides you with detailed instructions: “Go the the end of the aisle. Turn left. Walk until you can see the escalators. Go up one floor. You are in footwear.” Weeping with relief, you accept ByteLight’s offer to give you detailed step-by-step directions to a pair of shoes that is on sale (in addition to providing navigational information to particular items or areas, it also beams you information about nearby deals).
Phew! Thank goodness for extremely accurate indoor navigation apps. We’d all be hopelessly wandering in cosmetics until the end of time without the life-saving information that can be beamed to our phones from the lightbulbs—not to mention we’d miss ...
February 11 2011
Want the City to Fix a Crater-of-Doom Pothole? There’s an App for That
Doing good is getting easier. Soon, you’ll be able to do your civic duty of reporting potholes without even lifting a finger. The city of Boston is working on a smartphone app that would automatically report potholes to authorities–making it easier to find and fill the more than 19,000 potholes Boston grapples with each year.
The in-development Street Bump app uses a smartphone’s GPS and accelerometer technology to register the moment when a car lurches into a pothole and to identify the location. No need for the driver to call or email city officials, the app just goes ahead and sends the message on its own.
The engineers behind the app–who hail from the Boston mayor’s office of New Urban Mechanics, the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and the Santa Fe Complex–believe Street Bump will make city driving easier, and will save city government some headaches.
As the Boston Globe reports:
Currently, most potholes are identified by DPW repair crews dispatched to drive until they find them, Boston Public Works Commissioner Joanne Massaro said. Roughly one in every six potholes that ...
June 01 2010
Confused (and Injured) Pedestrian Sues Google Maps Over Bad Directions
On a midday stroll through Park City, Utah, you decide to turn onto the quaint-sounding Deer Valley Drive. You see this:
If you think you should turn back, you are not the intrepid Lauren Rosenberg. Armed with a Blackberry and Google Maps, she marched on, and could not believe when Patrick Harwood struck her with his car. She is now suing both Harwood and Google.
As CNET reports:
Perhaps some of you might think of Rosenberg as just a perambulating chaser. Yet she and her lawyers reason that Google’s walking directions were “careless, reckless, and negligent providing of unsafe directions.”
But what about Google Maps’ warning to such adventure-seekers? There’s a yellow box that appears whenever you request walking directions using their website: “Walking Direction are in Beta. Use caution–This route may be missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths.”
Apparently this isn’t enough. On Rosenberg’s Blackberry, the route lacked the warning. She feels this entitles her to over $10,000 in medical expenses.
Though GPS victims haven’t won in similar suits, Rosenberg’s turn in court will soon come. Here’s hoping someone drives her to the hearing.
Related content:
DISCOVER: Think Tech A GPS to Augment Your Entire Reality
80beats: Lost in Space: GPS System May Soon Begin Deteriorating
Discoblog: Teen Sues Mom for Hacking His Facebook Account
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Google Earth shows that cow and deer herds align like compass needles
Image: Google Maps / Danny Sullivan
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