Patent Watch: Apple's Calendar App Could Soon Tell You How Far You Are From A Meeting
by Joe White
June 2, 2011
In a recently discovered Apple patent application, the company outlines a smart Calendar app. The imagined app would be able to gauge the distance between an iPhone owner and a meeting venue, and calculate how long it might take to get there.
The patent is called "Dynamic Alerts for Calendar Events," and the feature would only be present within the iPhone or Wi-Fi + 3G iPad. This is because the Calendar app would use a GPS signal to determine its user's location, in order to calculate the distance between the user and the venue. As originally reported by Apple Insider:
Using a GPS signal, the iPhone could even determine travel time based on external factors, such as current or historical traffic conditions. Apple’s system would provide users with the best route based on this data, and alert them accordingly. Apple could even rely on crowd-sourced data to create such a system, offering up routes to users based on scheduled events such as concerts, sporting events, movies, public gatherings, and even retail store sale events.Sounds like a handy feature, right? Recently, it was suggested in an Apple press release that the company was developing its own mapping software. However, don't expect this to launch in iOS 5 - a couple of days ago, Google CEO Eric Schmidt confirmed that Apple was continuing to use Google Maps in the upcoming software update. Perhaps, Apple is instead collecting "crowd sourced" data for the above feature? Let us know your thoughts on the patent in the comments.