We Are In Agreement

USB Flower

Pretty sweet, especially for me as my answers to these questions ranged from "yes" to YES!!"

Pretty sweet. Except for your passengers.

iZUP (eyes-up) is a new product we saw demoed at the CTIA Wireless conference (see all stories) that addresses this head-on.

The app springs to life after it detects that your phone is traveling at speeds over 5 miles per hour, after which point it all but locks down the screen.

Cnet

The product is designed to prevent drivers from texting. It will also, apparently, prevent passengers in cars, trains, buses, rickshaws and taxis from texting.

Awesome.

And lest you think I'm taking this out of context:

iZUP team told us it's looking into such features as a passenger override, so that a non-driver can regain control of the phone.

I'll pass.

Dating via iPhone/Blackberry

Julian Sanchez (via Yglesias)

We’re at most a few years off from broad adoption of augmented reality applications in widely-used smartphones, which will have all of us radiating reams of data to anyone in our physical proximity who actually cares. Your Facebook profile will dog you like one of those floating Sims icons. You won’t just know what the girl sitting across the coffee shop is blasting on her iPod, you’ll be able to listen in. All the tech is actually here already, if not in quite the fancy form it’s implemented at the link above. All it would take is for someone to integrate the location-sensitive functions of an app like Loopt into the apps for Facebook or Last.fm, and you’ve got a point-and-profile system. The real question is whether people actually want to signal that much in the physical context.

Yglesias responds:

Of course the answer to Julian’s worry here would presumably be that you could use some kind of setting to signal implicitly or explicitly that you’re not interested in strangers talking to you. And the same feature could transform the dating scene; people not interested in amorous advances could broadcast this fact to the audiences, while those who are interested could also broadcast that. This, in turn, could change the dynamics at places like museums that aren’t customary places to meet people.

You know what I don't need? An iPhone app that alerts me to the fact that every dude within a city block is "available."

I bet your standard-issue 6.5+ woman in LA doesn't need it either.

And forget about gay dudes, I think it's just understood.

While the appeal of point-and-click profiling appeals to my creepy voyeuristic sensibilities, I don't see it gaining much popularity outside the realm of other creepy voyeurs.

Say you have a function on your iPhone that makes you "discoverable" to others within range (like a little randy bluetooth), you're just sitting there in Coffee Bean learing at the handful of (moslty male) discoverables in the join.

I'll pass.