Field Trip App from Google + Cronut Craze

Sometimes, just sometimes, technology is amazing.  Well...I guess A LOT of the time, technology is amazing, but on rare occasions, I find myself blown away by the computing power that we carry with us everyday.

This story is a case in point.  I carry an Android device in my pocket and I have Google's FieldTrip App on it.  It works on both Android and iPhone, so if you don't have it on your phone, you should go grab it now.  I'll wait.  Seriously...Go here and click the link for your app store.

Field Trip is this neat little pocket assistant that alerts you to interesting things in the world around you.  You can set your preferences (I lean heavily on movie scenes - like alerting me when I'm near a location that was used in a movie, architecture, history, and food.) and the app will buzz in your pocket to give you a little bit of knowledge that is contextually/geo-aware of your location.  It is pretty neat.

If you walk through the Loop everyday, the notifications can get a bit much, but there is some tuning you can do in the app.

Anyway, last week, I was walking to the train when my phone buzzed and gave me this Eater story about Cronuts.  The story says:

Elmhurst's Gur Sweets Bakery is the first local bakery to attempt to jump on the trend, calling theirs a "croughnut." Available Friday, pastry chef Rubina Hafeez has concocted two flavors of faux cronut for $5 a pop. A heavy dose of sugar covers her version and gooey vanilla filling oozes from layers of fried pastry. 

It remains to be seen whether the local market will take to the faux cronut or whether you'll see cronut footage on some VH1 nostalgia show in a few years. Whatever the outcome, they're about to be available in the western burbs.

As you can see from the photo above, I was walking right by Gur Sweets Bakery on York Street in the Elmhurst City Centre at that very moment.  

They weren't open yet in the am, so I couldn't actually *get* a Cronut, but the computing power that was involved - to know where I am located, to understand that I'm interested in food stuff, to look up in the index whether there is any food stuff that is relevant to my location, and to surface that to me all in a matter of seconds or miliseconds?  That's neat stuff.  

I'm (obviously) biased towards Google, but Field Trip is a really neat idea executed well.  Can't wait for it to get slurped up right into GoogleNow which is also where a lot of these predictive/geo/interest stuff is happening as Google becomes my digital assistant.

First it was 'demand' (search for stuff).  Now it is become 'suggest' and 'assist' (tell me stuff that I'm interested in or need to know).  Good on you, Google.  Keep the good stuff coming.