Ok, the crux of much of my current technology efforts are currently intertwined with Wireless Proximity content technologies, also called Point Server technologies, and even at times called "Location Based Services" technologies. The last is normally mix-mashed with efforts that utlize carrier triangulation to offer "location based" services over your carrier's connection -- therefore, for the sake of things -- we'll just call it proximity server technology .... a recent addition to the family of names can be found by Blogger Bryan Rieger, who gave it the name of Contextual Content Distribution. Whatever we call it (and I'm sure the industry will streamline itself soon), it's here to stay.
Basically, proximity technologies utilized technologies such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Infrared (IrDA), and ZigBee to distribute content related to a specific location or business to near by persons who are carrying the requiste corresponding devices to connect to these solutions. In English, this means that instead of using your carrier (AT&T, Eurotel, T-Mobile, etc...) to get SMSs or MMSs, or view streaming video on your handheld/phone -- which generally costs you money - you can get similar content, over those technologies as mentioned above, generally for free and at a very fast date rate. Additionally, this content is relevant to your physical location. Of course, as you'll see in this 4 part dicussion, not all proximity content solutions are free to the user (this should be a point of discussion among you all), but that's a minor point in this discussion.
What is important is that, instead of going out onto the net to look for information, the information is piped to you. You need to know what time your movie starts? You turn your phone one, and bam! If you're within 100m of the cinema, you can get the movie times table push to you. Not sure about that your girl wants to see, bam! You download a moview preview to your phone -- take it with you while you go tear up some Micky Dees. Didn't cost you a dime (or a small one at that).
Or, how about this -- you're in a cafe ... you whip out your phone, and you connect to a proximity server, and bam! You're browing personal and/or classifed ads. You add your own into the thin air. Antoher person comes within that 100m area, checks out the bulletin board service from their phone, and sees your ad ... while the term ubiquitous computing has already been used to discribe slighly different things, in reality this IS ubiquitous computing at its finest. There are TODAY, solutions which can do this, and we'll review them from a user perspective.
I can rant about the solution I'm currently involed in, but let me first give the floor to my fellow industry side-kicks.... Bluepulse, Wideray, Hypertag. I'm impressed with all of them, and I think you need to keep an eye on them all ... go check out their sites, I'll start the discussion on them for the next 3 days.
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