I'm in my car, parked three levels underground in the parking garage, and I realize as I'm about to get out I have no idea if I should bring my umbrella or not. I'd heard some rumors of a storm, but... ah, wait! I pull out my cellphone and hit the "MyStuff" button, at which point I get a menu : [1. Weather, 2. Stocks, 3. Headlines]. Pressing "1", I see a weather report current as of an hour or so ago, despite my "no signal" status.
Why haven't the cellphone companies offered this kind of service yet? My phone is idle most of the day - they could be slowly pushing data matching a particular profile out to my device, I should think a few K every 10 or 20 minutes would do fine. Combining this with the e-911 technology, I see no reason I shouldn't be able to get current weather reports for my locale on my phone all the time, which update automatically whenever I've got a good signal. No delays connecting to the net, no extra fees. I'd gladly pay a monthly rate for this.
Anyone hear of anyone actually rolling stuff like this out? In Europe or Japan, maybe? The key part is that the phone itself holds onto the data, and it doesn't bleep at you like the SMS news services - it just keeps its cache updated with however much stuff you specify.
12:24:39 AM 
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