Thursday, September 22, 2011

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.

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