Mid-Air Messaging?

boogahsmalls writes: "HP has been working on a nifty little project by the name of Cooltown that allows users to "paint" the air with comments using GPS and mobile phones. A more extensive write up is available over at New Scientist."

Slashdot.com

[autopr0n]

Slashdot.com points to the same machine now, I've seen that 'mistake' a lot lately, but really they aren't technically wrong. And slashdot is a commercial organization. Slashdot's 'historic' domain name may be 'slashdot.org' but 'slashdot.com' points to the right place and is really a better fit, these days.

Having worked with wireless location determination

[f00zbll]

The things mentioned in the article aren't new. Back in 99 when WAP was the hot thing, a lot of companies were already throwing out those ideas. Most of the them didn't understand it, nor did the carriers for political reasons.

A corporation that owns most of the malls in America has already considered deploying Mobile switching centers (MSC) in malls to get highly accurate location determination. They already have a shopping service during the holidays where a person can make a list of the items and give it to a mall staff. The staff person then goes to all the stores, stands in line, buys the item, wraps it and then bags it.

An extension to that service would be to use your cell phone. When you enter the mall, it sends you a WAP or SMS message asking you if you want to turn on shopping service. You go to the stores, and use your phone to scan the barcode. When you're done, you download the list to service and a starving college student stands in line for you. Of course there are a lot more ideas for commerce applications, but that is just one of them.

Wireless data by itself is worthless and a nitch service. Once you have accurate GPS with transparent data exchange, the service becomes a necessity.

On the fun side of things, there are tremendous opportunity to use GPS and wireless data for gaming purposes. Let your imagination run wild and you will see that things like RPG, Real-Time Strategy and Turn-Based Strategy games can move into a whole new world. Nokia already has a division for wireless games and there are several companies in Europe developing wireless games. Some people have even suggested using wireless data and GPS for dating services.