Imagine a future where you can let people know that you are in your car JUST BY LOOKING AT A WEB PAGE! Good news for you, since I have just arrived in a time machine and will give you the recipe FROM THE FUTURE to enable you to do this. Don’t worry, it uses items that are available in 2014, and if you follow the directions carefully, chances of a tear in the space-time continuum are very, very low. I think.
Items you’ll need:
1. An iPhone (4s or later) that has iOS 7 or later. Not sure I even needed to say that.
2. Beacon from http://store.twocanoes.com. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
3. Geohopper from the app store. Don’t worry, it is free. Like Star Trek NG, the app store is just a place for people to better themselves, rather than make money. Except for the Ferengi. And Apple.
Grab your new beacon, and plug it into your car. If your car doesn’t have a USB port, return the car to the 1990’s and go buy a better car. Or buy a USB power port adapter. In the future, we all have Apple jet packs that are beacon-enabled, so I would recommend keeping the car. The future is not that far away.
You car should look something like this:
Note the blue LED. Nothing screams “future” like a blue LED.
Now open up Geohopper, register for the service, and it will prompt you to set up your beacon. You now have a gigantic beacon called “your car”. Whenever you get in or out of your car, your phone will know.
Now for the futuristic, magic part. Hidden in the settings in Geohopper is “Status Board”. It has a link to your enter and exit events in HTML format. You can think of it as a URL to your car. (in the future, everyone calls these “car hyper-links” because the future is awesome).
Check it out:
Now email that link to your mother. Now when you tell her that you are “on your way”, you better be telling the truth. Your mom loved Ronald Reagan, and while she loves you too and believes what you say, she also knows the value in both trust AND verification. And she didn’t believe you last time about that “flu”.
Pretty sweet.
Now for your part. In order to save the human race, go buy a Bleu Station beacon at http://store.twocanoes.com. Install it using the instructions above. Once done, communicate back to me in the future with a secret messaging service called “Twitter” using the “hashtag” #geohopper. We monitor the service from the future and we are depending on you. You are our best and final hope. We are depending on you.