What happens if you get so lost that you don’t even know what street you’re on, and you can’t get a signal or GPS connection with your device? In that case, p2dir might be your best solution.
Dr. Moshe Yudkowsky, president of speech technology consulting company Disaggregate, is working on p2dir, a system that lets you call from any phone, then enter a local phone number - perhaps one posted on a local business or pay phone - and a phone number for the destination address. After that, p2dir performs a reverse directory lookup on the two numbers, finds a driving route and reads the results back.
While this may not be an everyday need in the age of GPS and mobile devices, it’s a valuable resource when you find yourself in a situation where those things aren’t available. If you get lost and your cell phone isn’t receiving a signal, you still have a way to find your route from any phone. Yudkowsky cleverly refers to this idea of using telephone numbers as a way to mark physical locations as “Telephone Accessible Geotagging.”
As Yudkowsky’s blog describes, “The easiest way to find a location is to do something the telephone is designed to do: enter a telephone number. Telephone numbers are everywhere: on doors of businesses, on signs, in people’s homes, at the desks of hotel lobbies.”
The source code for a demonstration version of P2Dir is open-source. Yudkowsky built the application with Ifbyphone, which provides a variety of telephony services and which gives free phone connection time to developers each month.
So, what do you think about “Telephone Accessible Geotagging” in this context? Would you use the service? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Language: English