so the upcoming wealth of iPhone applications is going to be amazing, i have no doubt whatsoever.

i was driving with jsherman this noon down to techshop in menlo park (which is pretty rad btw). we were blabbing about mobile apps, platforms and whatnot when we hit the upcoming iPhone.

everybody knows that the combination of data-always-on, GPS and semi-open-platform is going to create amazing stuff. i asked the question ‘what would you do with built-in GPS and just the native apps?’ guess what came up…

so, we all have meetings and whatnot in our calendar. i know that whenever i create an entry in my calendar i will usually create two alarms. one alarm will be a day in advance and the other will be, well, anywhere between 5 minutes and 2 hours before. your new iPhone is going to know where YOU are, its going to know where the MEETING will take place and its going to know how long it is before the meeting needs to take place. It could automatically let you know that you ‘need to start getting ready because you need to leave to the meeting soon’.

how about your in traffic trying to figure out if you’ll make it in time? i can never figure out what the social rules are, but i once read in this magazine my barber had that you can be up to five minutes late and its cool, you don’t need to call. i guess in israel you can be up to 30 minutes late and still get by. it will take just a few lines of code and some heuristics for your iPhone to tell you that ‘well, good points for trying to get to the meeting, but with your current speed it looks like your’e going to be late’.

what if your iphone would look each day to see if you have a meeting scheduled for lunch time the next day without a specific location and just popup to ask you ‘interested in hearing about lunch places around?’

i remember in past years these ideas would popup every now and then. I remember eden shochat and yuval tal talking about intelligent personal assistants. The thing is these ideas used seem irrelevant because of the barrier to entry. they would always require sophisticated software (triangulating cell-towers, searching for local businesses) and usually inexistent hardware (always on data? gps). i think this is all changing, with the upcoming iPhone and with the existing Google APIs (maps, search…), I can’t wait to be a happy user, and am super-interested in developing some of these things.