Snapping and sharing with the comm.unity p2p telephony platform
Imagine going on a trip and creating an ad-hoc group with the people you happen to be traveling with. Any picture anyone takes could be immediately distributed to all of the group’s devices.
Thus starts the description of Nadav Aharony’s comm.unity project.
Here is commentary by Worldchanging:
“Nadav Aharony’s work on peer to peer telephony, using a software platform called comm.unity. Aharony offers a demo running on Symbian mobile phones – he takes a photo and it quickly replicates itself to the comm.unity phones. That isn’t all that surprising – it’s basically a cool way of sending an MMS message to a group of phones..but the way it works is actually incredibly cool. Rather than sending a message to a cellphone tower, his phone finds nearby phones it is peered with, and sends the messages directly to the peers using WiFi.
Here’s why this is cool: While SMS is a very powerful tool for community organizing, repressive governments have gotten very good at disabling SMS around elections to help block protests (see Ethiopia for the paradigmatic example, as well as Cambodia.) Using a centralized technology for protest is often a poor decision. Peer to peer phone communication could allow for powerful activist uses for phones with little control by central authorities.
The killer application for this tech, of course, is the ability to make voice calls phone to phone, without paying the phone company. Unfortunately, there’s no incentive for hardware developers to fund this sort of research, as they’re currently locked in alliances with network operators, which might mean the tech languishes in obscurity.”
June 19th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
Also doable using bluetooth.