Hasta La Gadget!

Smartphone usage levels have basically exploded all over the place in recent years, and the number is most significant in urban centers simply because the infrastructure is there, there is a bevy of apps on your smartphone which has been deemed to be indispensable to many, and of course, peer pressure would play a role, too, not to mention the want for a better life. The thing is, this has also led to a corresponding rise in smartphone thefts, and in order to go up against the scourge of smartphone theft that is becoming increasingly more common, public officials, law enforcements agents, and a slew of other public workers have rallied together in cities like New York and San Francisco, with London being the latest city to have signed up with the Secure our Smartphones (SOS) initiative.

The SOS initiative will see a fair amount of professionals who will work with smartphone manufacturers so that theft deterrents for smartphones can be incorporated into future designs. London Mayor Boris Johnson dropped his views on why London has to join up with the SOS alliance, “Residents and visitors to our city need better protection from the menace of smartphone theft […] We need the industry to take this issue seriously and come up with a technical solution that can squash the illegal smartphone market that is fuelling this crime.” Let us hope that this is less of talk, and of course, more action!

London Signs Up For Secure Our Smartphones (SOS) Initiative original content from Ubergizmo.

Anyone who often relies on taxi service to get around, as good as it can be, has likely had a driver who was less than courteous — and in the worst cases, outright scary. Samsung wants to keep passengers safe, and drivers honest, through a just-published patent application for an end-to-end taxi service. On a basic level, it’s a taxi finder with a rating system: the mobile app in the patent can hail a nearby cab based on the driver’s “kindness” rating and verify that it’s the right vehicle with a short-range wireless link, not unlike an even more genteel version of Uber. It’s when passengers hop inside that Samsung’s implementation takes on a more distinct shape. If the driver puts customers or the whole cab in danger, a passenger-activated SOS mode flags the car’s location to get the police on the scene before it’s too late. We don’t know how likely Samsung is to implement such a system, although it has been actively developing more advanced backseat technology and filed the US patent in February, a year after its Korean equivalent. We do know this is one of the few patents we’d rather not completely experience first-hand — the only crazy taxis we’re comfortable with sit inside game consoles.

Filed under: Transportation

Samsung files for patent on safe taxi service, we hope we never fully test it originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Aug 2012 13:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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