Friday, June 22, 2012

Hyper-local chat and forum

Our mobile web application WiFi chat has been updated again. What kind of object (real or virtual) can we use for joining together mobile users? We are not talking here about members of social networks. 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 here is our new idea - Wi-Fi Chat. Forum and chat linked to some Wi-Fi network. Communication tools based on ideas of network proximity. It is a mobile application that lets you see available (visible) Wi-Fi networks and link (attach) discussions and chats to them. We are not talking about connecting to Wi-Fi networks. We are using any Wi-Fi network just as a sensor. If you can see it from your mobile, you are somewhere near. We can call it Wi-Fi 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 – Wi-Fi access point could be opened right on the mobile phone. And with WiFi chat 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 right from Android Market:

com.wifichat

Also you can download .apk file right from our server: http://servletsuite.com/WiFiChat.apk. Here is an appropriate QR-code:

QR code for WiFiChat

WiFi chat, actually, is a side project for our new development - SpotEx. This application uses ideas of proximity as a service and lets you attach (link) your own data to Wi-Fi access points. We will describe it separately.

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