Mobile App Idea #1: Gas Station Locator

From time to time, I think of ideas for marketable new products or services. My dear readers, I would like to share some of these ideas with you. If you find one of my ideas to be absolutely brilliant, so brilliant that you want to actually develop it, please do so. Unless otherwise noted, I will demand no royalties for my ideas.

However, if I conceived an idea, I might have further insights on how to actually implement it. You may want to pick my brain. Or at least send me a thank-you note for inspiring your profitable new invention. Just a thought.

Allow me to share with you an idea that came to me today for a new mobile phone application: a Gas Station Locator.

Running out of gasoline can be a rather inconvenient experience. Not that this has ever happened to me, of course; this is just what I hear.

Someone (maybe a fuel company? maybe AAA?) should develop a mobile phone application that uses the phone's GPS to locate the nearest gas stations. The app could be geo-visual, like the Nearest Tube application for the London Underground (see the YouTube video below).



The Gas Station Locator app (perhaps it could be called "Fuel Up!") could generate bubbles containing relevant information for each gas station - items like the station name, distance, estimated driving time till arrival, gas prices, sales and specials, availability of restrooms, and customer ratings. Maybe the application could even communicate with the vehicle's computer, to report how much further one can drive before running out of gas. Perhaps the driver could set a minimum gas level (something like "3 gallons", or "1/4-tank"), below which the application would automatically open and start locating nearby gas stations.

But drivers staring at cell phones kill people, you say.

The app should be completely audio-driven and voice-activated, so that the driver does not even need to look at the phone. The driver could ask the application to audibly list the stations in order of distance, or gas price. The app could even give spoken, turn-by-turn driving directions to the selected gas station.

Do you think drivers would like an app like this one? Do you know how to build it? How to coordinate all of that information? You are welcome to develop it with my blessing - you might be nice and let yours truly download it for free, though.