Placecasting

Rohit Bhargava recently blogged about Placecasting — “sending a message to bluetooth enabled devices within a specified geographic area.”

Within his article, Rohit mentions two solutions for Placecasting: a commercial application provided by Proximity Media (a subsidiary of Wiremedia) and an open-source application named Consola (by the way, if you visit the Consola website, don’t be fooled by the bars that move back and forth in a semi-circle — contrary to what I originally thought, this is not a loading movie for a Flash website — I must have sat there looking at it for a full minute before it dawned on me that it was just an animated logo!).

From the two solutions’ respective websites:

Proximity Media
Wiremedia’s proximity advertising solution allows for the distribution of rich media content and applications to mobile phones, laptops, and other Bluetooth-enabled handheld devices. Content that is engaging, interactive, and informative. The formula works when these wireless devices are relatively close to virtually any public and private spaces that are equipped with Wiremedia’s Bluetooth MediaServer

Consola
Consola is a ‘Bluetooth Proximity Media Server’ application for Mac OS X ‘Tiger’. It detects all Bluetooth enabled devices in range and sends them data such as text, images, animated gifs, audio, flash, video, java, or vCards.

It’s not clear to me if there is some ability to only send content to devices whose owners have granted permission, but assuming that ability is available, I think this presents quite an interesting opportunity for churches to reach out to those in their local area.

Does anyone know more about this technology? I wonder what the range is (which would obviously govern what you might be able to use it for).

Posted by on 06/08/06 at 10:03 AM

The Collective Voice!

Borges continues the discussion:

Hello, and thank you for your interest in placecasting.

First off, this is a term proposed by the Consola R&D group, that derives from broadcasting, and remarks Bluetooth’s most notable characteristic, the range.

Bluetooth was designed to be a short range radio communication system. Initially it was developed to be a wire free solution for mobile phones and accessories, and more recently, adapted to Location Based Services.

There are currently 3 classes of Bluetooth. Class 1 boasts the wider range (~100m), while Class 2 (~10m) is what you find in mobile phones. Through testing Consola with a Mac equipped with a Class 1 device, we were able to deliver content to a user at ~25m. This short range was seen by Consola as a great opportunity to deliver content specific to that location, and with network (WiFi, Internet) abilities, you can have a grid of locations, expanding your range, and remote monitoring the content to be sent.

The user experience should vary concerning the setup you desire for the service. Anyone that enters your placecasting range with the Bluetooth handset turned on, will be prompted to receive content.

Through a Yes and No alternative he replies to Consola. If he accepts, then Consola will proceed to deliver the content setup by the placecaster. If he rejects the transfer Consola will blacklist his device address, so that he is not disturbed again with requests. For registered users (through pairing their device to your emitter) you can have automatic synchronization of data or the ability to send unique information to that user.

The content to be sent can be of any format. The limitations occur on the receiving device, which can only read certain files, gif for images, 3gp for video, etc. By using the correct formats, you can create a Calendar of events, and have them be placecasted to your visitors mobile phones. The devices will store this information on the handset system calendar, with notifications, so everyone will be synched to your reunions.

We at Consola research and develop these abilities, while offering a free application for users to experiment with placecasting. We offer
know how and solutions for users to become self sufficient placecasters.

contributed on 06/15 at 02:13 PM

Brett Payne continues the discussion:

I’d be curious what the practical application of this is. I’m going to download Consola tomorrow and see how it works in my office. Any input would be great.

contributed on 08/15 at 08:03 PM

continues the discussion:

Thanks for your comment Brett. When I originally saw Rohit Bhargava’s post, I was envisioning something that would have a bit more range than the 25 meters Borges mentions in his comments. I was thinking in terms of an application (as long as it could be permission-based) that would allow a church to broadcast to its local neighborhood. But 25 meters wouldn’t even be practical within a church service, it seems to me.

In summary, it’s interesting, but I’m not sure of the practical application for the church either. If you have any ideas, I’m certainly open to hearing them!

contributed on 08/15 at 08:10 PM

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