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The Apple iPod And Porsche's Two for One Sale
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January 15, 2010

The Apple iPod And Porsche's Two for One Sale

By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor


From the 'Evidently We’ll Listen To Anything Apple (News - Alert) Says” department comes the news that Apple’s adding contacts to the iPhone’s home screen.

 
To which the proper response is: Oh.

Okay, all snide remarks aside, any click saved is a good thing. The reporter can’t count the number of buses he’s missed and times he’s been late because he had to perform two extra clicks to find a contact, but as industry observer Jesus Diaz says, “the contact icon won’t only bring contact information, it would be able to do much more:”

And it’s the “much more” that has folks salivating.

The icon “can also be used to invoke one or more applications that are personalized to the contact,” and “can be modified to display information related to the contact.”
But what’s sure to send geekdom into a shiver of just-because-we-can frisson and put dollar signs in advertisers’ eyes, “an icon associated with an entity can be temporarily displayed on the mobile device based on the proximity of the mobile device to the entity.”

As Eric Slivka says on MacRumors, “such a system is similar in some respects to Google Latitude and Loopt, but would offer direct home screen integration with proximity-based services. Apple has also expressed interest in such ‘location sharing’ technologies in other patent applications.”
In other words, if you have a contact for Midtown Porsche dealership on your iPhone (News - Alert), and you’re within a certain distance of them, the server for Midtown would send an alert to your iPhone notifying you that they’re having a special “two for one” deal today, buy one, get one free.
You can either click the icon to check it our further, or because you’re driving and you’d get arrested if you so much as think of using a cell phone in a car, you press “dismiss” since you have all the Porsches you need already.

As MDolley comments on the Australian Gizmo site, “You can already do this with Android (News - Alert) devices.” Yeah, Smarty-Pants, but they don’t look as cool as an iPhone, okay?

Of course you know what the next step in this evolutionary chain is: Opt-out push advertising regardless of proximity.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.

Edited by Marisa Torrieri


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