Project Idea 2: Bluetooth business card and P2P file sharing

The idea

I want to provide an easy way to let people know others around them. Sharing a public profile on smart phone through Bluetooth seems to be a good way to achieve this goal.
The idea comes from the common action of exchanging business card. But this app will provide more functions that are suitable for scenarios such as class meeting, conference and blind date…. Firstly, it will provide an easy way to recognize other and save their contact information. Secondly, user can share their files. Thirdly, additional functions can also be added e.g. anonymous census.
The different between this app with existing contact sharing, friend finder, P2P file sharing and social network is that the app only care about people near the user
and it is running on smart phone.

Application design

1. Incorporate with social media to get user's profile.
2. User a web server to store user's information such as Bluetooth Mac Address along with Facebook id(not username/password). But not a must for running the application.
3. Should be recoverable from interruption such as phone calls.
4. Should be energy efficient
5. P2P file transfer
6. Extensible to more functions, such as anonymous consensus.
7. Running on android 2.2
8. Have some kind of ranking when showing the name list

Existing projects

Jung et al. proposed BlueTorrent, a cooperative content sharing protocol for Bluetooth that exploits sparsely distributed BT-APs and allows user to cooperatively download large file. For my app, however, I am more interested in how to find the catalog of shared files among nearby users, rather than speed up the download process. And there will not be any Bluetooth access point available. BitTorrent-like file swarming is not very necessary.
There are several Bluetooth chat app, such as Bluehoo, a Bluetooth friend finder app on Windows Mobile platform, I believe the project has failed on 2008 after its beta release. I want to make my app be useful in multiple scenarios, including but not only for dating… I want to think my app as a business card or name tag, and let people to know others interests by sharing their picture and music.
Bluetooth File Transfer is a nice OBEX FTP and OPP file manager. Could be a good starting point for my file sharing module.
Cardflick they got a similar idea as mine, but not quite the same in the way of sharing it. Maybe my idea is more like a name tag instead of business card. They have a beautiful design of card templates.

Project Idea: UB parking information on smart phone

I hope this is not a "reinventing the wheel" kind of idea. Professor mentioned about using sensors to track parking space at UB, I wonder what is the status of that project? Is there an app on cell phone that will tell people the status of parking lots?

Basic idea

I'm thinking write a smart phone application that will instantaneously reflect the parking lot availability and provide parking suggestions. Inspired by the "crowd-source sensing and collaboration using Twitter", my app should leverage the power of twitter as a database and a well know platform. The information about available parking space should be gathered from both sensors at the parking lot entrance and tweets from people around the parking lot.

Design

Getting the information:

It would be nice to get information from both of these two ways, but I guess one source will be enough.

1. From sensors at parking lot entrance.
   

   Since there's already some project on this, I guess the only difficulty is to send the data to Twitter. Maybe we can use a "TwitterPeek" device.
   

2. From Twitter user.
   

   e.g. let people voluntarily tweet "#FurnasLot is full", or we can ask everyone on campus "is there any space at #FurnasLot?" and wait for their reply.
   

Processing information and providing service:

After getting information from twitter, we could either let the app itself to process the information or use a server to provided processed data. I'm inclined to uses a centralized web server, for two reasons:

1. Easier to manage data, eliminate false/outdate report, ensure consistency etc.
   
2. Keep track of parking lot usage as research data. There should be some interesting pattern in people's parking habits.
   

The app:

The application should have at least two functions:

1. Showing available parking space on map.
   
2. Provide an easy way to send tweet about parking information.