Detroit Walk of Fame could cement celebrity legacies

The concept is about more than plaques in the sidewalk: At Compuware, a innovation team has been quietly developing a high-tech smartphone application that would accompany the Walk of Fame with GPS-prompted content.

The project has caught the attention of Compuware CEO Peter Karmanos, who has directed a team led by chief innovation officer Paul Czarnik to develop a smartphone application for Walk of Fame users.

The cutting-edge app

The cutting-edge app would use GPS research to pinpoint a user's location and deliver related content. Arrive at Eminem's star, to illustrate, and your device would pipe in details about his life and career -- like as not even an audio message recorded by the rapper.

Other city tour applications have been created for mobile phones, however Czarnik said the hotspot features of the Compuware app gives it an ambitious edge. He said the app is a potential showpiece for the company.

"From my perspective, it's not just for the city of Detroit, now for the ability to show what we can do," he said. "You always read about millions of apps out there, yet we build performance apps. This isn't just a mockup -- it's a real working prototype, using cloud computing to hold the data. It's a real solid enterprise application we're building."