Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Hyper-local chat and forum

Our mobile mashup WiFiChat has been updated.

What kind of object (real or virtual) can we use for joining together mobile users? We are not talking here about social networks members. We are looking a way for creating group chat. Here, for example, is a short list for several our applications:

City forum - discussions (forums) linked to places (POI - point of interest)
Geo forum - the similar to above (also mobile forums) but linked to location
Mobile forum - lets you add discussions to any physical object.
City chat - web chat linked to any POI (point of interest)
Geo chat - web chat linked to some location

And WiFiChat is a new idea. It is a forum and chat linked to some WiFi network. This mobile application lets you see available (visible) Wi-Fi networks and link (attach) discussions and chats to them. We are not talking about connecting to WiFi networks. We are using WiFi network just as a sensor. If you can see it from your mobile, you are somewhere near. We can call it WiFi proximity. That is an idea. All people seeing the same network are in the some proximity. So, they could have some common points for the discussions.

Just one interesting remark – WiFi access point could be opened right on the mobile phone. And with WiFiChat application this phone will play a role of presence sensor uniting (combining together) local people for the communications.

Technically this application uses cloud forums from Disqus and web chat from Coldbeans.

You can load .apk from here:

http://servletsuite.com/WiFiChat.apk

or use an appropriate QR-code:

QR code for WiFiChat

You can also download this application right from Android Market

WiFiChat, actually, is a side project for our new development - SpotEx. This application lets you attach (link) your own data to WiFi access points.

No comments: