Location Based Disservices

A rather curious way to use my coordinates

Using one of my most prized iPhone apps, MLB At-Bat the other day, I was struck by the above. This was a curious bit of crappiness. I had heard something about this app using location info, but I wasn’t expecting it to use my coordinates against me so literally. Clearly there are *legitimate* contract rules for blackouts and all that hubbub, and I guess having this requirement, if it means live games, is worth it.

Perhaps in my naïvety I’ve been sitting here thinking about using earth-coordinates to enhance some kind of mobile experience, when clearly there is this whole other realm of Location Based Disservices. How many other strange and anachronistic restrictions are out there that could be LEVERAGED in such a way? Certainly there are countless others in sports.

A few obvious ones spring to mind:

• Our iPhone NFL app can force us to watch the Raiders lose every week.
• If we are in Utah, we can be prohibited from downloading episodes of Big Love from the iTunes Mobile store! (second that for the iBeer app).
• Warning: all calls placed from California can not be routed to South Carolina

Human / Robot Hybrid Path Finding

[from here]

Ok? I’m immediately reminded of that little guy in WALL-E, you know that guy? (not WALL-E, that other little guy).

but hrm — is this something you like, watch, then replicate IRL? Or are you kind of like, moving and path-following the green line until you get to starbucks, with the thing tracking you? I mean, is that dude’s paper map was entirely insufficient? Or the GPS directions? Wasn’t GPS supposed to solve the “starbucks” problem first? It seems like the biggest problem with on-foot navigation systems is heading, especially if you have a bad sense of direction. I’ve used slippy maps + GPS, using the “walking directions” routing a few dozen times in various places I’m not super familiar with (most recently in Portland, OR, where everything is on a pretty map friendly grid), and the biggest issue in my mind is heading. Yeah, but once you are confident that you are walking in the correct direction, that problem is pretty much solved, in my mind.

I think, rather than using the go-to starbucks example on a city street, and framing the problem in relation to traditional or phone-based gps navigation, these kind of systems could be best shown off in corporate parks (or other complex indoor spaces). I think that’s how this stuff might better represent the *problems* they are attempting to solve. I definitely cringe when they show a picture of some poor schmuck with a paper map, and assume that he are such an idiot that he can’t follow normal human-generated directions along a grid.

I know that this is just a technical demo or whatever, but I think it’s important for these kind of things to think about what the actual problems are that are trying to be solved here. The situation they’ve covered seems like punting on what ultimately should be the most relevant or important part: why does this exist?