Group App Icon
United States Patent & Trademark Office [Application #20100070758] reveals an iPhone App (“iGroups”) in which a number of these type devices co-located at a geographic location can broadcast and receive “tokens” (tokens – legalese or technospeak for social networking stuff).
Apple’s iGroup will be a service that will work on your iPhone(R) (or iPad) and likely work with a number of other Apple proprietary apps (e.g., calendars, address books, email, and instant messaging). iGroups would automatically detect that a group of users is in or around a specific location. The concept is to allow groups of friends attending an event (family get together, concert, meeting, tradeshow and more to stay in communication with each other as a group to share information to live events as they unfold.
Further descriptions such as, “In some implementations, the tokens can be stored with corresponding timestamps to assist a trusted service in matching the tokens with tokens provided by other devices” gave it a ‘Big Brother’ feel, particularly in light of recent Internet privacy concerns.
Tags: App, Apple Rumors
Is this like so many other things “big corporate” America comes up with. File a patent with no intention of using but with full intent of suing someone that develops a variation of it later and tries to use it. Lots of lawsuits these days… Apple, Google, others not to mention picking fights with China. There needs to be another way!
OMG
Apple is the new big brother!