I came across an article on Hacker News that cited this recently issued patent by Apple:
Patent Number 8,577,392
Assignee Apple, Inc.
Priority Date June 13, 2012
According to the Hacker News article, the patent relates to proximity based home automation. I am sure there has to be prior art on this. They talk about it in the movie AntiTrust and I'm pretty sure I've seen videos on the internet showing people using a proximity based system to turn on lights, computers/etc.
Claim 1 -
A device for relaying location information, the device comprising:
a) A receiver to receive first signals from a plurality of first devices associated with a person, each of the first signals comprising first data, the first data being indicative of an estimated location of the person, wherein, for at least one of the first devices, the first data is indicative of a real-time user-input activity;
b) A location estimator to estimate a location of the person associated with the plurality of first devices, the location estimator comprising: - a data aggregator to aggregate at least some of the first data in the first signals; and
c) a weight assigner to assign one or more weights to the first data in the first signals, wherein the estimated location of the person is based at least in part on the assigned weights;
d) A signal generator to generate one or more second signals based on the estimated location of the person, each of the one or more second signals comprising second data; and
e) A transmitter that transmit the one or more second signals to a plurality of second devices.
It talks about doing certain actions while in different locations, and the lifehacker link below talks about doing different things based on different networks you connect to, which sounds a lot like this patent.
Is this something that can still be reversed due to prior art?
(A limited example could be this: lifehacker.com/265822/automate-proximity-and-location+based-computer-actions from back in 2007)