I was sitting on the Sportster in the middle of a parking lot about ten miles from the lake when a man approached me with a troubled look on his face. He was late for an appointment and wanted to know if I knew where the Northeast Eye Institute was. Unfortunately, I had never hear of it but told him I would be glad to look it up in Google Maps for him. He said, "the Internet on a call phone?". In a few seconds I had the location and a phone number which I clicked on asked them where exactly their office was and I relayed to him how to get there. He shook my hand with a big thank you and a grin on his face. As he walked away, I grinned too. The iPhone is a very high utility device. The other lesson for me was confirmation that the mobile Internet is huge and has now grown to it’s infancy.
The reason I was sitting in the parking lot was to look for a nearby geocache. Geopher Lite is a GPS based iPhone application which allows you to find geocaches "quickly and easily" on the go. It actually wasn’t that quick and easy but when I got back to the lake a few hours later I checked for iPhone updates. Sure enough there was an update for Geopher Lite which incorporated some of the obvious deficiencies. This is the great thing — apps are always brought up to date with a touch of the phonetop and developers are constantly going to be making improvements. I can see that tight integration with geocaching.com is just a, probably short, matter of time. If I was in the handheld GPS business I would be concerned. The iPhone is going to disintermediate a lot of businesses.
Epilogue: Speaking of gouaches, I found a very interesting one yesterday titled "William Howard Taft’s Forefathers and Family". Finding it was not much of a challenge but seeing the small cemetery across the road from the Lake Wallenpaupack Observation Dike was quite a surprise. I have driven by it hundreds of times and did not even know it was there. The cemetery was built by the Taft family more than 150 years ago and holds the remains of the great, great, great, great grandfather of William Howard Taft, the 27th President of the United States, along with about ten other family members.
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