I’m not known for my sense of direction, in fact if we are lost and I say go right, left is your best bet. So when I arrived in California I decided to buy a navigation system for my car, and thus the research began. I wanted something to play with, since 90% of the time you don’t really need the system, it should do other things, like give you the traffic situation. Hence I found Dash, a networked GPS that uses anonymous driver data from other units to give you traffic patterns.
The cool thing is that since it is networked you can do on the fly Yahoo searches, and get updates on things like speed traps. By allowing users to create their own apps people have already begun to create some pretty cool things. There is the app that works as kind of a poor mans lojack, and one that will let you use Twitter. I’d like to see an app that gave you reminders based on location, and I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before someone releases an application to let you talk to that cutie in the car next to you at the stop light.
Probably the most disturbing application I’ve tried so far is one that let’s you see where the registered sex offenders in your area live. Its like William Gibson said: "The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet."
