Thu 8 Oct 2009
StationStops Schedule App Back in iTunes
Posted by TJ under Apps, StationStops
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Tired of the fake word “app” yet? Me too, and I wish William Safire was around to make fun of it.
Speaking of apps, the app-spat between commuter advocacy site StationStops.com and the MTA over StationStops’ iPhone app has reached detente, says StationStops auteur/app-master Chris Schoenfeld.
Reads a StationStops press release:
Apple reinstated the app this week in response to a priority request from the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) which retracted its previous intellectual property claims against the application.
The MTA had claimed that outside parties making money off its schedule information was an infringement of its copyright, and ordered the removal of the app from the iTunes store in August. StationStops saw it differently. The case was being followed carefully by the media, including the blogosphere, and the legal community.
Schoenfeld suggests the railroad work with him, not against him:
“MTA has publicly stated that it wishes to reconsider its approach to mobile application development and I applaud them for this turnaround. This has been accompanied by additional gestures of meaningful action, but there is still much more to be done. The MTA is a massive transit service with serious budgetary concerns and, as incoming CEO Jay Walder has identified, is sorely lacking in real-time information delivery to its customers. By simply publishing their existing schedule database and other information online, as other major transit agencies have done, outside developers have the ability to fill massive gaps in real-time customer information for MTA at little or no cost - in a timeframe MTA could never realize internally.”

