Stroke of Genius: Yellowpages for Phone April 06, 2007 11:01:18 AM
This morning while I was in the shower, I had yet another stroke of genius! I started thinking about how annoying it was when you are out with your friends or your driving and you realize you need to call some business for closure times, prices, or reservations, and you don't have their number. In these cases, what do we normally do? Remember, your already out and about. You normally call information (411 which costs money) or you call a friend who might be in front of a computer (usually someone who plays WOW).
Well how about this? Wouldn't it be nice if the phone number was already in your phone? If you think about it, it's really not that bad an idea. You may already have hundreds of numbers in your phone, so why not add a separate contact directory solely for a yellow pages? Sure there would have to be a better searching method, but thats all on the software side and can easily be developed
I've even thought out the logistics. Phones these days usually come with a minimum of 128MB of flash based memory built right onto the processor's main bus usually for all that multimedia jazz. As phones get newer, they are only going to have even more. Now lets say you only want to store the phone number and the businesses name. Using a 7 bit per character scheme, we are looking at about 500,000 to 700,000 entries per 10MB. That's enough business phone numbers for a quarter of Pennsylvania! Add a little bit of compression, and you could easily fit an entire state's yellow page listings in under 25MB, not even a quarter of a phones memory.
Marketing this could be handled as external add-on packages for your phone. You could go to a cellphone retailer and buy a micro-flash disk for the state of your choosing or go online and buy the Download file. It's genius! Unfortunately, unless I work for a cell phone manufacturer or provider, I don't think my idea will ever see the light of day :-( Because to them, we are the little people, we are the 'stupid consumers', BA! what do they know?
User:
Anonymous
COMMENT: I like this! It would totally sell.