A funny and interesting story was recently reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, and then again on www.cnet.com that is worthy of retelling here. Before getting into the story, however, a brief description of an iPhone app by the name of Alert and Respond is in order. Among other things, Alert and Respond has a GPS feature that tracks the iPhone in real time.
The application was designed to operate as a tracking device, of sorts, such that, once installed, it tracks the location of the iPhone.
Alert and Respond could be useful for a variety of reasons, ranging from tracking down an iPhone owner equipped with the application, who was lost hiking, to simply locating a misplaced iPhone. In addition to offering a simple tracking device, Alert and Respond also provides a host of other features. To name just a couple, it can activate a walkie-talkie signal to hear what is going on at the other end of the iPhone. Also, it can cause the iPhone to snap a picture from a remote location to provide a real time visual of where the iPhone is located.
These features were designed to help track down missing people and the likes.
That preface should be sufficient to get on with the story reported in the Chronicle and online. Last week, a bicyclist was riding his bike down Market Street in San Francisco when he noticed a crowd gathered around an iPhone display. For whatever reason, the cyclist decided that it would be a good idea to ride his bike up to the display, grab the iPhone and ride off to safety with his new acquisition. Unfortunately for the biker, his plan went off without a hitch. Or so he thought.
The cyclist made it away from the display with his stolen iPhone 4, and he surely believed he was in the clear. What he didn’t know was that he had just stolen the iPhone from a live demonstration of Alert and Respond. The team from Alert and Respond had set up shop right there on Market Street, and was showing passers by how the application worked. When the cyclist stole the iPhone, Alert and Respond was activated and working in full force.
What this meant for the thief was that the Alert and Respond team was able to watch his location on a screen in real time as he hurried away. What turned out to be bad fortune for the cyclist couldn’t have been more opportune for Alert and Respond. It must have seemed like a staged marketing gimmick to the passers by, as it didn’t take long at all for Alert and Respond to report to the police precisely where the thief was hiding out with the iPhone 4.
In the end, Alert and Respond recuperated its new iPhone, and the cyclist was charged with grand larceny. So instead of coming up with a new iPhone 4, the thief landed himself criminal charges, and possibly even time in jail.
