Expanding Social Networking To Buisnesses.

Not sure where to put this... but

Here's my thought, take a room full of people, tablets, phones, etc, but where's the connectivity? eg, let's suppose you wanted to communicate on some level to all the other devices.

For security purposes, we can eliminate most of the security features of Bluetooth, for example with bluetooth, if you wanted to send a picture or transfer a file, that's simply not going
to be possible, the chip would only allow up to 255 characters and anyone listening will get the packet, the idea is some kind of low power, low cost module which allows you to send a broadcast
message (along with a unique identifier, like a MAC) to anyone listening...

*Low Power
*Low Bandwidth 255 byte packets, ASCII.
*No authentication

If it took off, think of it like an old style pager system, you simply "grab" anything intended for your MAC address or read all the data, simple servers could be hosted on the device to broadcast
alerts, eg "dinner ready" "3 drinks for the price of 2" which are broadcast out to anyone listening, you could even reply back "table 12 please"

Shops, could use it.
People could use it to socialize with others (Anyone want?)

I could think of a thousand uses given enough time, Bluetooth almost fits the job except it's too sophisticated, eg, too much security 255 byte UDP style packets

EG (facebook tells you about a promotion 2 for 1 at some pub)... but you're NOT actually at the pub, with this system, they'd know you are an offer accordingly.. some kind of filtering system could be put in place..
I think the NRF24L01 has potential to do such a job, but i'm not sure maybe something new has to be invented.

EG (facebook tells you about a promotion 2 for 1 at some pub)... but you're NOT actually at the pub, with this system, they'd know you are an offer accordingly

Isn't that what FourSquare does?

dxw00d:

EG (facebook tells you about a promotion 2 for 1 at some pub)... but you're NOT actually at the pub, with this system, they'd know you are an offer accordingly

Isn't that what FourSquare does?

ForSquare only delivers information to you if you're in a specific zone? (eg, if you're at home, forsquare wont advertise offers to you?)

I've never used it, but I believe that's the idea.

why not use wifi?

wifi would simply use too much energy... in my mind, i have something that can communicate with others, really cheaply and extremely low power and low bandwidth.

The games you could invent to pass boredom would be great if you're able to send packets and recv packets from anyone near by using the same technology without the problem of pairing, passwords, authentication, power consumption.

If people are in the same place you could get social by talking with them. I know it seems like a concept from the past but it is low power and low bandwidth. It also helps to pass boredom.

The password problem is also non existent. The pairing might be an issue though

LOL. Driving multiple teenagers around these days can be interesting. Sometimes it is eerily quiet in the car, the only sound being the clicking of mobile phone keys.

actually, @udo klein ... while it may be low power, its actually ultra high (and wide) bandwidth.

Ultra high bandwidth??? How come?

Think: its 100% analog. You would need quite the data connection for conveying all the details your ears can soak up from the sounds my mouth makes. Never mind the plethora of sensations you experience if I shake your hand, starting from the moisture and the various pressure sensations all over your hand all the way to the subtle movements of my fingers and arm. Add my smell, the ultra-high rez image you see etc. etc.

100% uncompressed as well...

IMHO you confuse analog + hard to sample + low latency with high bandwidth. The "ultra high resolution image" you perceive to see is not so high resolution as you seem to think.

well, its continuous, right? so in theory I am sampling it with infinite precision, right? ok, lets say its limited by the amount of neurons in my retina. These still send out analogue signals (ok, no - they actually send digital signals, but the frequency of these digital impulses varies on a continuous spectrum).

I was under the impression, that this would accumulate to a very high data throughput.

If I am wrong, and you have some sources on the topic (or a simple explanation), please post some links. I would find this very interesting.

Continuous? This is a mathematical concept. If this applies to physical reality is already subject to discussion.
Sampling at infinite precision? You are making up your argument. You nerve cells can hardly sample at infinite precision.
AFAIK nervous cells do not frequency modulate. They have varying recovery times though.

However the bandwidth question is not decided by how hard it would be to emulate nerve cells and how much bandwidth this would need. We are discussing the bandwidth that could be pushed into a human's input channels. I doubt that this would be more than 10 Mbit/s (= vanilla ethernet). Let alone the >100MByte/s my Sata Drives can sustain. --> nothing ultra high bandwidth here.

Basically you argue that analog has "data rate" due to the fact that you would need unlimited data to faithfully reproduce everything down to the noise floor of an analog signal. With the same argument you could show that every (digital) signal exceeds its own bandwidth.

please explain. I am not trolling. I simply do not follow your reasoning. I have some background in neuroscience, and understand basic electronics, but ... well... I dont get your argument.

I repeat. I am not interested in proving you wrong. I just dont understand what you mean.

(gut, bin auch betrunken. aber hab mir meine originalen argumente ja nüchtern ausgedacht ... ---)

I think his argument stems from raw data eg take a 650 meg music cd 8 4 minute tracks and the disc is nearly full at 44khz using compression and digital algo's we shrink a 120 meg raw audio dump into 5 meg..

yet to the ear what's the difference?

cjdelphi gets my point

@fkeel: you assume that it would take extraordinary high bandwidth to deliver a high fidelity and faithful model of the world. Something like the USS Enterprise holodeck. On the other side I am arguing about the bandwidth that can actually be processed by a human. I am just aiming at the sensors (=eyes, ears, nose, skin). I have very strong doubt that these sensors deliver more than ~10 Mbit per second to the brain.

Let's restrict to the eyes for a moment. There is only so much resolution that your eyes have. Nobody has Gigapixel vision. However the eyes have pan+zoom capabilities. Hence the need for large screens. And hence the need for more bandwidth in the visualization devices. However if we would project pictures right to the retina a much lower resolution would suffice. Still it would be necessary to move the projection according to the movement of the eyes in order to sustain the illusion. But this has nothing to do with bandwidth. It has something to do with us not being able to (a) imperceptibly project to the retina and (b) to adapt for quick movements. (a) is a shortcoming of suitable projectors and (b) is a latency issue.

Now let's have a look at the ears. As cjdelphi noticed mp3 compression reduces bandwidth a lot. However as anyone can easily verify a mp3 song is different from live music. This is because you can walk around and notice how the sound will change according to your position. But consider for a moment we would be able to properly track the head angle and position and deliver suitably adapted sound. Then again mp3 bandwidth would be sufficient. Again we fail to deliver this due to large latency.

In both cases we do not need ultra high bandwidth. Given current technology we can not create such an illusion but this is not due to bandwidth. Acutally even with ultra high bandwidth we can not create such an illusion today. But now consider for a moment we would be able to tap directly into the brains or at least into the nerves to the eyes and ears. Then the bandwidth of the nerves would be relevant. There is nothing outside that must be rendered "just in case". Here I have more than strong doubts that nerves can deliver such high bandwidths. What is the maximum frequency nervous cells can fire? What are the maximum levels they can actually resolve? 8bit? Probably more. 16bit? Probably more. 128 bit? I doubt this (Because this would mean less than 10e-38 of the maximum resolution for the lowest bit). So I think we can assume that no pulse will deliver more than 128 bits. So how many pulses do they send? You argue that the frequency may play a role. Again how luch is this modulation? Again I doubt that you can transmit more 128bit through this additional channel. So far this is an upper bound of 16 Bytes per "fire event". How many events can one cell deliver per second? How many cells are there in parallel? Now where is the hugh bandwidth to be expected from?

yep. you are right. I do think you are underestimating the complexity of the retina, but the way you are describing it (and what you think my assumptions are) makes sense.

I might actually do the math. I am really curious now.

According to http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9633-calculating-the-speed-of-sight my 10 MBit/s guess seems to be the proper magnitude.