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At this rate, it only has to be a matter of time before Apple starts touting the iPhone as a crime fighter via its GPS features. Who was the unlucky thief this time? Someone who decided to steal an iPhone during a demonstration of its GPS capabilities, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Apparently Horatio Toure, a 31-year-old resident of San Francisco rode a bicycle up to a woman on Monday afternoon in the South of Market neighborhood, and grabbed an iPhone out of her hands, and then proceeded to bike away.
But what our karma prone friend didn't realize is that the woman that had the iPhone was using it as part of a company's demonstration of a real-time GPS tracking program. Had Toure so much as bothered to look at the screen, he probably would have noticed his getaway path was also being tracked.
He wound up being picked up by police a half-mile away 10 minutes later, said police Sgt. Troy Dangerfield. He was taken to jail on suspicion of grand theft and possession of stolen property.
"This reminds me of the bank robber who arrives during the security test," according to phone owner David Kahn.
Kahn, chief executive with Covia Labs of Mountain View, was in San Francisco on Monday demonstrating a product called Alert & Respond to some of his PR colleagues.
The product is geared for the police and military, but can also be integrated with phones, computers, and the like.
Kahn had asked an assistant to take his phone out on the sidewalk area during the demonstration so that he could track her location on a laptop. But seconds after she walked away, she immediately reappeared on Alert & Respond, and was running quickly down the street. The assistant would go back into the office and call police, relaying the phone's location to them.
"What are the odds," asked Kahn, "that you would grab someone's cell phone during a demonstration of the ability to track the phone's location in real time? That's what this unfortunate thief did."
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