This isn't an endorsement. I've never laid a fingerprint on an iPhone. But if you have an iPhone and you need a ride — maybe you could afford gas until you started paying those monthy iPhone bills — maybe you'd like to check out an iPhone app called Carticipate.
It's for finding a rider, or a ride, on the fly. It's either the next big thing or the next goofy thing, or both.
“It’s a new wrinkle on ride-sharing which basically is mobile and location-aware," Steffen Frost of somewhere in California, one of the creators of Carticipate, said by voice mail.
"Since the phone is location-aware, it already knows where you’re at. You just say where you’re going and it broadcasts that."
By e-mail he added: "Other carticipatants [sic] will find each other if they are in the same area and are going in the same direction around the same time."
Of course it's useless without all those other people who also have the same little app installed on their iPhones.
If you're an iPhoner, you already know that you can download lots of iPhone applications at iTunes, which I remember from back in the day when people used it to download tunes.
Bruce Siceloff reports on traffic and transportation. A News & Observer reporter, editor and blogger since 1976, he took over the