I have an idea for a really cool service that I don’t see myself developing anytime soon. Though if there are some funders and mobile hackers who want to collaborate I would be willing to go for it.

The iPhone and recent Qik streams that I saw, gave me this idea:

Create a distress application on the iPhone. Tapping it shows you a Yes/No button to indicate whether you are really in distress. A distress call sends a live video stream from your iPhone, a cellular phone connection and your best guess location as received from Google Maps to a party who can aid you.

These parties can be one of two:

Social: Other users who use the service and who are nearby are alerted and they are expected to at least make the effort to move towards you and keep tabs of what’s happening. Heroic measures are not required but if somebody who’s feeling threatened is no longer alone their threat level usually also decreases.
This would imply a high level of social coherence and necessitate a way to penalize people ignoring distress calls. But I think the willingness to ‘make society work’ is present and seeing an old lady afraid of being mugged would prompt most people to at least walk over and check if she’s ok.

Premium: This is where you can make the money. The easiest case would be to connect the person to a 911 (or 112) central and have law enforcement officials assess the threat and take action. This works for the base case and in societies which have a functioning rule of law.
People who want extra protection or who don’t want to depend on official police could contract a SLA which depending on the amount of money paid could dispatch private security enforcers to your location by car or by helicopter (from $2000/month up or so).
I think there are enough people with enough fear that this could be a viable business model.

The problem with the premium model is that it opens up avenues towards a freelance police state (of the Blackwater type). For me and I think for the coherence of society in general, this makes the social model more desirable.

Direct communication and location information is going to have large effects on how society works and is organized but I think that has been obvious for some time now.

Determinism

And they pretty much taught us in our technical university that that technological determinism was not the way to go. There was some discussion but not nearly enough. In ethics classes I think the American approach of giving all the arguments and have students debate it out is far better, than the soft socialist Dutch approach of implying a One True Way (you’ll won’t usually find a convincing pro-Death penalty argument in course readers).

I’m not saying technology is the end all. But implementations carry with them their own values which are difficult to work around to say the least and technology which makes difficult or impossible things convenient, radically changes societies and is completely unquestioned by new generations. We have seen this and we’re going to see more of it in the future.

While none of the four starters have iPhones just yet (except for Cristiano apparanty), we do have apple notebooks and we are certainly considering them. Thus, I’ll continue the thread that Cristiano started about the new iPhone SDK, announced recently.

I’m a little bit disappointed that the iPhone SDK does not allow you to write software that runs in the background. Only apple’s own software (such as iTunes, which obviously continues to run even when you are not browsing iTunes on your iPhone) has that privilege. Many words have been written about this limitation. That last link in particular sparked my imagination.

Instead of reflecting on the fairness of the background thing, I thought I’d dive into the kind of application you could write if you could run your iPhone software in the background. A bunch of app ideas after the fold!

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There has been some controversy going on about the prohibitions on background processes for iPhone applications using the SDK.

Picture by Alper

This pretty much rules out a client such as the Jaiku mobile client which sends your status updates to a server and gets your buddies’ statuses. But yes there will be ton of useful applications nevertheless.

The single app model reminds me somewhat of my old Palm Vx which also had the concept of a single foreground app. It still is one of the most usable handheld devices I have used with loads of applications available for it. I used it intensively as the wear and tear on the picture probably shows.

Of course this was before the age of connectivity, so a background app could not have done much anyway and later versions of the Palm OS allowed for MP3 playback in the background while you were doing other things.

Palm is all but forgotten now, let’s see how the iPhone does.

I was talking and thinking about the recently released Apple iPhone SDK today, and realized that while I like the major idea of a controlled application platform I did have my doubts about some of the more intricate details. Selling an application for your price through the Apple controlled store sounds like solid business model for both Apple and developers, but quickly shows an contrast with how developers really build a community around their products.

Uniform Price Model

As far as I can understand, Apple let’s you set your own price, which at first sounds very cool, but is eventually very limiting in real life. Inherently this model will force anyone into a uniform price plan, which isn’t the same uniform price plan that is set in the iTunes music store where every song is either £0.79 or £0.99, but it does force every developer to stick to the same price for every customer. This poses an intricate problem for developers that might want to perform some kind of price discrimination.
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Originally posted on the “Cristiano on Tech/Life” blog

Obviously I didn’t get a contract with my brand new iPhone, simply because I don’t have the budget to spend £35 a month on a contract. Maybe in the future I will buy a contract anyway, but for now I am basically stuck with my expensive Dutch contract. In other words: I had to hack my iPhone. With doing this I ran into some issues, which I will try to highlight in the following article, giving some reference for all you other people that are thinking of buying a UK iPhone.

Defining “UK iPhone”

Let’s start by quickly explaining what I mean with the “UK iPhone”. This is kind of important as there are different iPhones out there. With the UK iPhone I mean the iPhone that is currently (January 1st, 2008) sold in the UK that ships with the 1.1.2 firmware (see here to learn how to check firmware you have). iPhones shipped with this firmware Out Of the Box (commonly called OOB or OTB) ship with a new bootloader/baseband. This new bootloader has some repercussions that I will get to later.

Everything I will tell in this article might also hold for the US, German, or French 1.1.2 OOB phones, but I don’t know for sure because I don’t have these phones.

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