OK - I don’t have the time or the technical chops to develop mapping based tools, but here’s a few application ideas that could be interesting. I’m sure there are other folks with these ideas, and there’s nothing truly specific about the iPhone as a platform, other than it’s upcoming ubiquity and relative ease of development and deployment.
GetTogether
There’s been a number of applications that leverage some kind of social networking conduit to simplify getting together with people, but I can think of one other really simple location based tool that would be very handy. Two people with iPhones that know each other and want to get together. Very handy for when you’re on vacation and want to reunite with people that have gone separate ways during the daytime. The requestor pings the other other person who responds with a confirmation (can you say badges and alerts?). Both iPhone exchange their current GPS location and jumps to Google Maps for a pedestrian route between the two. Both people can follow the instructions and they’ll meet up somewhere in the middle depending on how fast each of them walks.
Go one step further down the monetization route and have the application calculate the midpoint of the route and signal any points of interest within 100m of the estimated encounter point (museums, cafés, restaurants, movie theaters, ….)
OnSite
An enterprise application with it’s own server for managing similar kinds of communications as GetTogether, with an eye for coordinating employee contacts. I’m often in the situation of meeting colleagues near a client site and we often end up managing the last 100m by getting on the phone and talking each other through the route. “OK, from here I can see a red sculpture to my left and the building in front of me is named xxx…”. Although Apple has clearly stated that the iPhone is not to be used for fleet management, this would be seriously useful for day to day employee management. Of course the application should have the ability for the employee to block location transmissions outside of work hours and on schedule vacation days.
An interesting project that requires both iPhone terminal development and back-end server development.
RealWorldCoverage
Are you as tired as I am with the almost fictional cell coverage maps proposed by the various telcos? A community project where you can activate a tracking mode that collects your location along with the signal quality of the cellular network which is later uploaded anonymously to a community site where the data is collated to present a true, validated coverage map of service. This would be immensely useful in determining where you are really going to get 3G service vs EDGE vs nothing at all.
I suspect that this could also be of real value to the operators since much of the time their coverage maps are based on projected values calculated from the theoretical capacity of the equipment installed. They don’t necessarily have the resources (nor often access) to run around and check for dead spots caused by signal reflection. This could become the authoritative data source for coverage instead of the wishful thinking maps proposed by the operators. The data will be an empiric snapshot rather than the usual complaints of “I can’t get service in my office/home/…”.
SmartWifi
Here’s a way to optimize your battery life by setting up some smarts for when and where to activate the wifi connection. Have your wifi connection turn on and off based on where you are. You’re within 100m of your house? Wifi on. You get in the car and start driving? Wifi off. You arrive at the office? Wifi on.
I’m tired of having the wifi connect window pop up every 10 minutes in the train as I pass through residential neighborhoods.
This could also be extended to include other configuration options of the iPhone like the ringtone volume.
GTD
I’m sure all of the folks working busily on porting their GTD apps will be doing this since it’s inherent in the approach. Some contexts are location dependent so it makes perfect sense for the application to automatically present you with things to do based on geographic contexts. You’re passing by the grocery store and the first list presented to you in the app are the those associated to contexts based on proximity. Better yet, the application alerts you when you pass by a context with outstanding items. How many times have I passed by a store thinking of something else and realised later that I forgot to stop in? Too many.
Combined with scheduled items you can really optimise your task management for recurring tasks like buying monthly rail passes in the last days of the month when you’re at the train station. Exactly the sort of thing that’s easily forgotten.
Next up…
The new phone is coming along with the application store - what other ideas are out there?