BlueCasting

[GrumbleDook]

I'll put this in the General Chat to start with to see what sort of response I get, but it covers a bit of hardware, a bit of software and possibly projects too.

 

I've been having a chat with a few people over the last week and an online discussion this evening raised it again.

 

There are lots of schools that are anti-mobile phones, but some are looking for ways to make them useful. This is not a discussion about whether this is right or wrong, but if we just take the view that we *want* the kids to have mobiles, on particular BT enabled mobiles (or PDAs or netbooks, etc).

 

Here is the challenge. I want to be able to send out a file to a large number of BT enabled devices, the same way you can see it happening in shopping centres, etc. I know BlueCasting is an actual company that has good products to do this ... but can it be done for free?

 

I will be shortly rattling off an email to a few laptop manufacturers and some phone companies to see what response I get about free methods of doing this in education, but does anyone know of any other solutions ... or even open source projects looking at this?

 

I'll even drop a note to a few Capita partners who do the SMS stuff to see if they have ideas about it ...

[Ric_]

A quick Google does turn up a couple of Freeware items... MeetingPoint is one that lloks promising but most of the links I found were dead (except FreewarePPC.com - Freeware Pocket PC / Freeware Windows Mobile: MeetingPoint v0.95 Beta ).

 

I can see your thinking here and it would certainly have its uses in an education environment.

[muppet]

@ Grumbledook

Haven't had the chance of looking at any of the linked products, but I hope they may be of use to you.

 

free proximity marketing bluetooth download

[SYNACK]

Both KDE and Gnome now offer quite good integration of bluetooth and given linux's abilities at the command line a script could probably do this without to much bother. You could probably even encapsulate it into a web applet so that any complication was abstracted from the end user.

 

Hacking Cell Phones via Bluetooth Tools under Linux

Hacking into Bluetooth phones using Linux - Navi Arora

The KDE Bluetooth Framework

SourceForge.net: KDE Bluetooth Framework

[GrumbleDook]

One of the folks digging for this has been pointed towards Main Page - Openmoko so it could be interesting (pointed by the Google School of Code folks)

 

So more digging to do then.

[powdarrmonkey]

I have an Openmoko.

[plexer]

Did anyone find any good free/open source blecasting software?

 

I saw this in use at a conference yesterday and thought it was a good idea.

 

ToroBlue.com - Bluetooth proximity marketing - send your business details directly to customer's cell phones is only £85

 

Ben

[plexer]

Found some open source linux s/w

 

OpenProximity Center ‎(AIRcable ©)‎

 

Ben

[Gatt]

@GrumbleDook - We literaly had a company in yesterday talking about their product

Company is called NextGen - they are heavily involved with most Police forces (Met, Merseyside, etc) and were also involved in the Rhys Jones investigation where their product was used to send out BT Messages (Ani-Gifs) asking for information

 

The pitch seemed good and we are about to start running a trial to see how effective it is...

[GrumbleDook]

Oooh ... that sounds interesting. Karl is also looking at this too so will pass it on.

[Gatt]

Will let you know how the trial goes when we start it..

hey seemed very open to developing it for schools, and was pretty impressive in what it can do..

[KarlGoddard]

Oooh ... that sounds interesting. Karl is also looking at this too so will pass it on.

 

Small world indeed.... the address on the website is actually 100 yards down the road from my school

 

Never knew there was an IT company on that block - just a dry cleaners and a kebab shop