DC Inauguration Video 121808 from Daniel R. Odio on Vimeo.
by Frank James
Smartphone owners intending to visit Washington for the Obama inaugural (that probably narrows the field of all inauguration visitors to around one million people right there) may want to check out a free phone application I just learned about.
Using your phone's GPS functionality, the ap allows visitors to navigate around the nation's capital by foot or Metro train, make restaurant reservations, find free-wifi locations, know where they are in relation to inaugural parties, the whole shebang,
The ap's creators also envision adding functions in time for the inauguration to alert users to where longest waiting times are so they can avoid crowds at museums etc, or report on emergencies. And they hope to include a feature that will let people submit and read each others' reviews of restaurants, bars etc.
The ap comes courtesy of Qorvis, the public-relations firm; Patton Boggs, the law firm, and PointAbout, a software maker. For them, it represents an excellent opportunity to get their brands in front of potentially hundreds of thousands of visitors to the city.
Of course, you don't get something for nothing. In exchange for the free ap, the providers have the ability to get some information too. On its website, PointAbout tells its business customers:
When our thin-client native application launches your website or web application, we provide it with location and user profile data, so you will know exactly where in the world the user is, and also exactly who the user is.
In a world of Facebook and Twitter, this probably won't matter to a lot of people.
Another possible issue: the wireless industry has warned that so many people will be using their cell phones that system congestion could cause dropped calls or an inability to get through at times, although the industry is adding extra capacity to try and minimize such problems.
As someone who lives here in the Washington metro area, I plan on downloading the ap into my Palm Treo and checking it out. It'd actually be great for us locals if the providers kept it up and going long past the inauguration.
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