In cities, cell phones can direct lost pedestrians to the nearest subway station.
Desperate to find a clean bathroom? The click of a few buttons now can lead you to relief.
Many of these new cell-phone applications have not yet gained wide usage, and several of them depend on user-input to succeed. All are finalists in this year’s Navteq Global Challenge, an annual contest.
Developers at San Francisco-based Urban Mapping took advantage of the maps the company makes for MapQuest and the search engines Google and Yahoo when creating its public transit map application, said Ian White, the company’s chief executive.
With the application, users can find the nearest transit-system stop and get directions to it from their location. So far, developers have programmed the data with maps of 60 mass-transit systems in the U.S. and have plans to expand coverage into Europe. White does not expect the application to be available for cell-phone users until April at the earliest.
People engaged in a search more urgent than locating the nearest bus stop might be interested in the site developed by Yojo Mobile. MizPee (mizpee.com) tracks the locations of restrooms in 20 U.S. cities. The company just launched a sister service covering six major European cities (youreapeein.com). Users can add locations and rate their cleanliness on a scale of 1 to 5 rolls with 5 being a “royal flush” and 1 being a “prison toilet.”
“Cleanliness, I don’t think, is something you can find just by asking someone on the street,” said Peter Olfe, president of San Francisco-based Yojo. “It’s one of those services that screams for a mobile.”
