Notices

Greetings:


I must have already asked a couple of times if someone would be able to develop a maemo program like this one from Buzzone.

Buzzone is an application that makes it easier for people to search for new contacts and communicate using Bluetooth PDAs and laptops.

It only works on PDAs.

You can read more about here:
http://www.buzzone.net/eng/index.html

All I can say is if a program such as this would be possible on an N800, finding business contacts would be much easier.

Regards Robert

Zeroconf instant messaging using Bluetooth? Sounds interesting, like iChat on the Mac (over some Ethernet connection such as wifi of course).

Greetings:


So do you think such a program can be developed.

It would open a new way in social and business networking.

Think about it rather than networking with 100ths of business contacts at Conferences, you can now find the right business contact just by word tagging the type of contacts your are looking for.

Regards Robert

I think it would certainly be doable, you do need a critical mass of users though to make it worthwhile which means you'd also need to write a version in Java so people can run it on their phones.

Otherwise you may as well go the "bonjour" route and limit yourself to tablets or other wifi enabled devices - the Bonjour (zeroconf) and service discovery stuff is all out there. I'm not sure whether it could be directly transplanted to use Bluetooth as the communications medium or if it would be worth going for some simpler scheme.

There are things like instant messenger apps for Bluetooth (e.g. http://www.valhallachat.com/?q=overview with source available too), it's in Java as it needs to run on phones, this may be an issue for us though).

Anyway, sounds interesting. Anyone with more Bluetooth knowledge know if you could do a service discovery (where the service is "job title", "interests", etc.) using Bluetooth?

Simon

If people wanted to give you their contact info, they would do so.

My Palm T3 came with such an app built-in. I never got to use it in practice. One of those applications that immediately looked like it would be very useful, what with collaborative "whiteboard" interactions over bluetooth etc. In the real world this doesn't happen though. Well, sending contact info over bluetooth _is_ used, and it's very useful. The rest isn't, really. You can already send a contact to a Nokia tablet via BT, it'll end up as a .vcf file on the N800 (vcard). Off hand I don't remember if it can be imported into contacs, I think it can but as the contacts database in OS2007 is rather limited it would probably strip out a lot of the vcard info.

Because not enough people have the same/compatible software?

I was thinking more along the lines of context aware pervasive systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context...vasive_systems)

No, it doesn't seem to be that. I'm often in company with people with the same software, but when you're close enough to have bluetooth working it seems to always be much simpler to collaborate through traditional means (even using the proverbial pen+napkin). Well, except for interchanging contact info, as already mentioned.

It's a bit vague, but there's probably some stuff in there that could actually work. Not sure which though, which I think is what I'm getting at.. a lot of things that _seem_ to be very useful turn out not to be, and sometimes the other way around.

I know what you mean, but it's the thought of the way it might work that's quite cool. Probably not much of it is really very useful as you say.