"ANCESTRY. I don't totally understand this variable. It's a fill-in-the-blank question on the American Community Survey, but there weren't any Asian categories."
Looks like a Japanese design firm tried something similar back in 2013 called the unbrella, still shipping for about $90 (http://h-concept.jp/fs/hshop/c/unbrella).
Minor marketing fail that while the Kazbrella solves the 'brush against other people's pants' problem, it doesn't solve the 'drip water on the floor problem', yet the promotional video implies it will.
If you are interested in life tracking, you might want to try out one of our (Whereoscope, YC10) apps called DriveTime.
Passively monitors your location every 10 minutes, collates, and then lets you view graphs etc. from within the app. Information is not shared with anyone - it's designed purely for an individual user.
I realize this is a self-serving post, but thought it might be relevant. The app just got dropped to $0.99.
I don't want to veer O/T, but that's not the hard stuff in CLLocation.
There's a lot that could be discussed, but as one example: optimizing for battery conservation requires knowing which radios are currently powered up.
iOS makes its own decision as to which of the 3 styles of location service to engage, based on the desiredAccuracy and distanceFilter values.
However the WiFi/GPS radio have different costs for runtime and warmup, so this API doesn't help when you are attempting to optimize for all 3 of: Accuracy, Timeliness, Battery conservation
Furthermore, the accessible battery percentage in UIDevice.batteryLevel is only reported to the nearest 5%, which is not granular enough to be of use in real-time server-based tweaking.
is the place to start, where they state "If you start this service and your application is subsequently terminated, the system automatically relaunches the application into the background if a new event arrives."
The other required piece of information is that when you reboot the phone, it triggers this event for all applications that have registered this service.
I'm curious about this - I've seen that behavior with Android users as well.
Why specifically do you want to turn WiFi, GPS, and bluetooth on or off? I can think of several potential reasons, but would like a user's perspective.
You raise valid criticisms, and ones we considered for some time before building the product as we did.
a) Multiple proxies for demand exist, from the existing carrier-based services to portable GPS units to the use of cards swiped at the school gate in Japan and China.
b) Agreed. And the people we share our go-to-market plan with agree.
I make it a point to speak on the phone to several families a week. We have heard from hundreds of users directly via e-mail.
There is a long road from thousands to tens of millions - we don't pretend otherwise, but we do have that road mapped out.
Latitude (and other friend finders) are solving a different problem.
Our users (families, couples, etc.) tell us their main concerns are:
1) Privacy model: people don't want to broadcast location to everyone, or (particularly for women) have their use of such a service be known. Having adjustable privacy settings don't solve this problem.
2) Battery: As soon as you notice battery drain, users turn the service off.
We believe we've solved the first (with small, closed, private groups) and the second (with sampling only when necessary).
Our Android version is under development right now.
Definitely :) I'm one of the developers and we actually have hockey teams, couples, real estate agents, small legal teams and tour bus drivers using the app as it is.
There are also quite a few people who just track their own iPhone in case it's lost, stolen, or for curiosity about their own movements.