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I have been work­ing into Inno­va­tion for a long time and part of my day job was try­ing to under­stand which side use our cus­tomers could make of the tech­nol­ogy, prod­uct or ser­vice I was analyzing.

iPhone Baby Monitor

One of the golden rules is that users are always more cre­ative than you. They will always find dif­fer­ent ways to make an effec­tive user of your tech­nol­ogy, prod­uct or ser­vice. Some­times the way you prod­uct is used is very far from your orig­i­nal concept.

Take Twit­ter as an exam­ple. The ser­vice was launched to allow the user to answer a sim­ple ques­tion: “What are you doing?”.

Over time Twit­ter has evolved and now you can check if your plant needs water, you can mon­i­tor stocks, you can be alerted of cal­en­dar events or you can even unlock doors with a sim­ple twit. I am sure that Twit­ter cre­ators were not think­ing about these appli­ca­tions when they con­ceived the service.

Yes­ter­day night I was brows­ing the Apple appli­ca­tion store and found an inter­est­ing appli­ca­tion: Baby Mon­i­tor.

This is the descrip­tion of the appli­ca­tion com­ing from the devel­oper web site:

Mon­i­tor your sleep­ing baby with this iPhone app. Sim­ply place the iPhone near your sleep­ing baby, if it detects noise, it places a phone call to the num­ber of your choice, you can then lis­ten in for activ­ity from your baby.

Isn’t this cool? Yes it is.

Ok. Let’s have a closer look at the appli­ca­tion description:

• Place the iPhone near your sleep­ing baby. This is the orig­i­nal use of the appli­ca­tion. The first thought I had is that I can place the iPhone in a meet­ing room, any­where in my house, or in a bag that some­one can bring with him.
• It detects noise and place a phone call. This means that I can receive a call when­ever some­one starts a con­ver­sa­tion in the meet­ing room, or answer a phone call in the liv­ing room and so on.
• You can then lis­ten in for activ­ity from your baby. I can lis­ten to con­ver­sa­tions hap­pen­ing in any of the places I have described before.

We can now rephrase the orig­i­nal sentence:

Mon­i­tor your sub­ject with this device. Sim­ply place the device near the sub­ject you want to mon­i­tor, if it detects noise, it places a phone call to the num­ber of your choice, you can then lis­ten in for activ­ity from your subject.

Isn’t this the per­fect descrip­tion of a spy device?

As you can see this appli­ca­tion was orig­i­nal built to help par­ents mon­i­tor their child when you are trav­el­ing but it can also be used for more nasty activ­i­ties. I am pretty much sure that devel­op­ers has were never think­ing about this nasty applications.

Some­thing you may want to con­sider when think­ing about your next iPhone application.

Actu­ally from a quick inves­ti­ga­tion I did the very same kind of appli­ca­tion is avail­able for almost any open Oper­at­ing Sys­tem mobile phone.

Related posts:

1. iPhone, My Impres­sions After One Week
2. iPhone Sight­ings
3. I Finally Got An iPhone
4. iPhone Was Not Designed To Do This
5. Apple Warns Hack­ing iPhone May Harm It