couriers enhanced!

With so much hype into Google latitude, it eventually came alive around Feb 4th, 2009. Ideas at best especially with Google, this one is just amazing. The thought of such a thing blew me off. I for one, have always wanted to reach out to people or things I need and right at that thought. Now I am a step closer.

Well, I have not planned for G1 or iPhone yet, but I will one day. Seriously, even without all these gadgets, we seemed to have used the latitude concept almost everyday. Let me throw some instances...

(1) Long before mobiles came into being and even before proper land-lines were operational, in a remote village in Tamil Nadu, India, the latitude (or rather map-sense or even Djikstra's shortest path algorithm) was used. One fine day, while none of us were home, the post delivery person (of course, Indian Postal service) had checked our home (those days, they used to check our neighbours too) and eventually couldnt deliver that day. But we were just a couple of hours from home, and when we figured out we missed a post (quite an important one), we were worried. Well, I had different ideas, I sat down thinking about the route (path) the post-man would have taken and kinda figured out where he would have headed and there he was, exactly where I expected him to be. All it took for me was a few calculations on his path (Djikstra's algorithm) and sense for direction (Latitude).

(2) Lets take another instance, the most recent one. It was on Feb 9th, just about 4 days since Google released Latitude, I was again expecting my parcel. This time though, I had a mobile phone and the parcel was to be delivered by UPS, me being in Redmond, WA, USA - a whole different ball game. I used Google Checkout to order a few toys (which had been outdated) online in ToysRUs - for some reason, the delivery address had pointed to my old address and still the address itself was wrong (Apartment number was missing). Sure enough, UPS attempted to deliver, and sure enough, I had called them and updated the address correctly. The only problem was, I had a flight to catch to Chicago around 6pm and UPS had given a nice commitment that they would deliver anytime between 9am and 7pm. I decided to give it a try and thankfully I had a friend in that old address and rushed there (I couldnt change the entire address calling UPS), stayed all day, and was constantly refreshing my tracking number page in UPS.com website. And there you go, at around 3:30pm, UPS made the mistake and they couldnt deliver stating the address was incorrect - well couldnt help that as there was a note (apartment number) to the UPS truck driver which he apparently missed, but thanks to the update system, the tracking number got updated in a few minutes after the driver missed it. I called up the service desk immediately and kinda asked them to send it back to ToysRUs and updated them I cannot recieve because of my travel plans. But the guy on the service desk (Mr. Brown), thanks to him, we had different ideas. He suggested I can track him down, as the driver would not have gone too far (just half an hour). He put me on hold, and in parallel, talked with the driver to connect both of us (both our latitudes). While the conference call was on, my search too was on, I started following the path of the UPS truck religiously, the directions as given by Mr. Brown and there he was, where I could spot him by a few blocks from my old address.

So contrasting time periods, so contrasting technologies, eventually solving the purposes. I love science and technology! So why did I bring in Google latitude here, ah! I hope you have figured it, Google Latitude can now be used to track the driver anywhere by the courier company and sure enough the truck driver can track me wherever I am to deliver it to me - probably someone would patent this idea as they would patent turmeric, and start making big bucks. Of course, the whole privacy war has started (actually heated-up for a while now), but yea, technology can only be enhanced from where it is currently! Google latitude, my brain is turning wild of ideas!