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Comment by rauljara | Hacker News Reader

[Even though this app apparently doesn't open itself automatically] it's occurred to me before that there's a lot of potential for apps/web apps that do run automatically (after asking for permission, of course) when you get onto to a business's wifi. Menu's in restaurants, searchable maps in big department stores, bar code scanning apps for products (of course, with reviews), etc. etc. etc.

-edited to add the stuff that's in brackets

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Finding a business's wifi automatically - which allows you and the business to know when you're actually in the store (or really close enough) is a really good concept. Eventually, more and more businesses will have wifi and this type of recognition (with user approval of course) could make for an accurate passive experience (i.e. don't have to take your phone out and perform actions to get benefits). Interesting possibilities...

A bonus, think about the sort of analytics you could get out of such a thing. Even though GPS isn't very effective indoors, consider that nearly every product on their floor has Wi-Fi. It's conceivable that you'd be able to get a fairly accurate trail of your customers as they go through the store, actually tracking specific people's movements instead of just "X people crossed the tripwire in front of the Mac Pros"

This one doesn't run automatically though, from what I can read. It only works if you're using the "Apple Store" app already.

The title is nonsense.

I can see how this works in this particular case, with only Apple stores and while running a special app, but in the general case, how will they know that you're in their store and not the one next to them?

I would assume over time that geo-location coordinates will get more accurate and that there will be an assumption of which place you frequent the most will be given priority over other apps.

A clever solution used by e.g. Shopkick is to play a very high-pitched sound of a certain frequency on the store sound system and pick that up with the device microphone.

I don't know if Apple is using this here. I bet they're instead identifying it by store Wi-Fi, since Apple stores all have that already. But for stores without Wi-Fi, the sound system trick works well since all stores have sound systems already.

I doubt that either the store sound systems or the phone's microphones perform well at frequencies above the audible, though, so it may not be quite the drop-in solution that it appears to be at first.

There are a bunch of different solutions to this problem being explored. Being able to give provide location context-specific services in your applications is something that I personally think is going to be a huge thing in the next few years.

My current company is actually providing developers with a service (currently Android only) to provide better location contexts in their apps.

If you're interested you can take a look at our homepage from my profile. We just launched our public beta this week so if this sort of thing interests you as an app developer, please check it out :)

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