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).
I believe that the internet provides today's church with a historic opportunity .... to tell the old, old story of Jesus and His love in ways which could only have been imagined in times past. The objective of this website is to explore the various ways in which today's technology can be used to spread the gospel around the world.
