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."

Just think of the dating possibilities!

[jpiterak]

Just think of the dating possibilities! You go into a bar... See an attractive woman, go to strike up conversation, perhaps buy her a drink... Your phone bleeps, displays:

"Don't even think about it creep... My boyfriend's a 270 lb bodybuilder"

... Ah, the pain you've saved yourself!

Besides, there's a lovely lass alone in the corner, with the simple message:

"single"...

CoolTown is not this...

[John_McKee]

CoolTown is an HP program out of HP Labs., A cross between R&D/Think Tank, much like Xerox PARC, Its goal is to find way to integrate technology into our every day lives, as shown by this project. To quote HP:

Cooltown is our vision of a technology future where people, places, and things are first class citizens of the connected world, wired and wireless - a place where e-services meet the physical world, where humans are mobile, devices and services are federated and context-aware, and everything has a web presence.

The cooltown vision of a responsive world of mobile services requires clear, creative thinking about technology. For several years, HP Labs has been working at the intersection of nomadicity, appliances, networking, and the web. Our model for this research is one of open collaboration and partnership with others who share similar goals. Creating a cooltown ecosystem requires vision and technology, but above all else it takes a community of like-minded people who believe in open participation, investing in the web, and creating real solutions that add value to people's lives. Our goal is to help bring that community together, to openly share ideas and implementations, and to make a real contribution to the web and to the world.

This is just one of many projects that have come, and will come out of this program. Hopefully HP will do something more useful with them then Xerox did with PARC, but I digress...

think filtering

[jonbrewer]

Any information can be filtered. If we have such a system, we certainly wouldn't have to receive everything all the time.

Just look at Slashdot. I browse at +2, unless I have time and desire to read more. Slashdot certainly has a lot of crap, but I choose to filter is. It would be trivial to implement such a system for HP's Cooltown.

Taking that further, I can see location-based annotation as a pay service. If I were Zagat I could charge people for the service of displaying ratings when they walked in front of a Restaurant. I know I would pay for such a service. I like walking around and finding nice places (As opposed to planning in advance), and I would pay to know beforehand from a reliable source what I should expect from the food.

I can think of many other examples, but I think I'll rush to patent them instead of posting them on /. :-)