Hurray. We can now finally talk about the work we did at MSR last year. The output from it is an electronic notice board. Big deal! The wrinkle of our system is that it can be used without any client software for uploading and downloading of content via BlueTooth. As we are developing for Africa, we had to build a system that cost nothing (i.e. did not incur network charges). Also, it had to work without installing custom software.

 

The obvious solution is to use BlueTooth, but that requires pairing with the screen, or requires the screen to spam / Bluejack the same content to everyone in a given radius. Not good.

 

The solution we settled on requires the user to take a photo of the screen which shows the content they are interested in. Say the user sees a note about a someone looking for a plumber and they want to find out more. The user takes a photo of the note and Bluetooths it to the screen. This can be done without pairing. When the screen receives the photo, the unique ID of the phone is automatically encoded in the transmission. The screen can then image process the photo to see what the user wants and then send the information directly to the handset as the handset ID is now known. The information sent could include any sort of media - a vCard of the person needing the plumber and a JPG of a map showing how to get to their house.

 

Better still, users can Bluetooth information to the screen to upload notes for subsequent download.

 

When you start to think about it, there are a lot of applications for this technology. We are currently investigating its use in schools and in providing voting information to rural parts of South Africa.