Fwd: wifi/bluetooth communication software for iPhone, intro to company founder
Margarita Quihuis
From: Jessica Margolin <jes...@margolin-consulting.com>
Date: Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 2:57 PM
Subject: wifi/bluetooth communication software for iPhone, intro to company founder
To: car...@educar.org, bo.mcf...@gmail.com
Cc: Margarita Quihuis <margarit...@gmail.com>
Hi, Carlos.
Bo is an entrepreneur in the SF Bay Area who has a new product called "Bleam" which is an iPhone app that uses bluetooth or wifi to form ad hoc groups for communication. He and I were talking about ways he could help in Haiti, and I thought you might have a suggestion or two for him to consider, perhaps with your own need to connect medicatl people together. Is that a fair intro, Bo?
http://www.bleam.me/?tag=bleam-appstore-iphone-ipodtouch-text-bluetooth-wifi
-Jessica
--
www.linkedin.com/in/margaritaquihuis
http://www.facebook.com/margarita.quihuis
http://twitter.com/msquihuis
http://margaritaquihuis.posterous.com
http://captology.stanford.edu
http://peace.stanford.edu
http://www.facebook.com/peacedot
twitter.com/peacedot
650 245 5117 cell
alex
iphone offline scenario
On Jan 26, 10:05 pm, Margarita Quihuis <margarita.quih...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Jessica Margolin <jess...@margolin-consulting.com>
> Date: Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 2:57 PM
> Subject: wifi/bluetooth communication software for iPhone, intro to company
> founder
> To: car...@educar.org, bo.mcfarl...@gmail.com
> Cc: Margarita Quihuis <margarita.quih...@gmail.com>
>
> Hi, Carlos.
> Bo is an entrepreneur in the SF Bay Area who has a new product called
> "Bleam" which is an iPhone app that uses bluetooth or wifi to form ad hoc
> groups for communication. He and I were talking about ways he could help in
> Haiti, and I thought you might have a suggestion or two for him to consider,
> perhaps with your own need to connect medicatl people together. Is that a
> fair intro, Bo?
>
> http://www.bleam.me/?tag=bleam-appstore-iphone-ipodtouch-text-bluetoo...
>
> -Jessica
>
> --www.linkedin.com/in/margaritaquihuishttp://www.facebook.com/margarita.quihuishttp://twitter.com/msquihuishttp://margaritaquihuis.posterous.com
>
> http://captology.stanford.eduhttp://peace.stanford.eduhttp://www.facebook.com/peacedot
Margarita Quihuis
From: alex <a3.mi...@gmail.com>
To: MedApps4Haiti <medapp...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Tue, January 26, 2010 6:50:07 PM
Subject: Re: Fwd: wifi/bluetooth communication software for iPhone, intro to company founder
Bo
App store soon. It enables text, chat, and sending of photos and
contacts. The network is an ad-hoc Bluetooth scatternet. Every
iPhone or iPod touch is a peer and extends the physical range of the
network when Bleamers are in range of each other. Bleam will also
work on both WiFi and Bluetooth. It will bridge Bluetooth connected
Bleamers and WiFi connected Bleamers as well.
Bleam can also work when the iPhone is in sleep mode - though not as
well. We have in the setting part of the app a place to turn
Autosleep off and turn vibrate on. So if Bleam is running and you
press the top button to turn your iPhone into sleep mode, Bleam is
still running and will vibrate if you get a message. We discovered
this feature by accident. Bleam doesn't work as well in this mode,
but it still works. iPod touches don't vibrate so Bleam will run but
not vibrate in sleep mode. The downside to running Bleam so that it
works in sleep mode is the user has to always physically put the
device to sleep, but you get used to it pretty fast.
I don't know how much Bleam4Haiti will help, but we just want to help
in whatever small way we can.
Bo McFarland
Far Waters, LLC
Cell: 415-509-4666
Skype: bomcfarland
AIM/iChat: xenogenebobo
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bo
On Jan 26, 7:22 pm, Margarita Quihuis <msquih...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> I have added Bo to the google group.
>
> ________________________________
> From: alex <a3.mira...@gmail.com>
> To: MedApps4Haiti <medapp...@googlegroups.com>
> Sent: Tue, January 26, 2010 6:50:07 PM
> Subject: Re: Fwd: wifi/bluetooth communication software for iPhone, intro to company founder
>
> Hey, I would like to chat with him, to talk about our ad-hoc iphone to
> iphone offline scenario
>
> On Jan 26, 10:05 pm, Margarita Quihuis <margarita.quih...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> > From: Jessica Margolin <jess...@margolin-consulting.com>
> > Date: Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 2:57 PM
> > Subject: wifi/bluetooth communication software for iPhone, intro to company
> > founder
> > To: car...@educar.org, bo.mcfarl...@gmail.com
> > Cc: Margarita Quihuis <margarita.quih...@gmail.com>
>
> > Hi, Carlos.
> > Bo is an entrepreneur in the SF Bay Area who has a new product called
> > "Bleam" which is an iPhone app that uses bluetooth or wifi to form ad hoc
> > groups for communication. He and I were talking about ways he could help in
> > Haiti, and I thought you might have a suggestion or two for him to consider,
> > perhaps with your own need to connect medicatl people together. Is that a
> > fair intro, Bo?
>
> >http://www.bleam.me/?tag=bleam-appstore-iphone-ipodtouch-text-bluetoo...
>
> > -Jessica
>
> > --www.linkedin.com/in/margaritaquihuishttp://www.facebook.com/margarita...
>
> >http://captology.stanford.eduhttp://peace.stanford.eduhttp://www.face...
Bo
I checked with a man named Bill Woodcock about whether Bleam4Haiti
would help or hurt the situation in Haiti. The answer is it would
hurt and I pulled it from the App Store review process. BTW, Mr.
Woodcock is very versed in what is and what is not working in Haiti
with technology. Many things have hurt the situation. See Bill's
response below:
From: Bill Woodcock <wo...@pch.net>
Date: February 13, 2010 6:52:38 PM PST
To: Bo McFarland <bo.mcf...@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Bleam4Haiti
To be blunt, yes, this is exactly the kind of thing that's breaking
the network in Haiti. As it would break the network anywhere it was
used widely, or the network was already overtaxed. The use-case for
which you've designed is environments where there's no existing
cellular or Internet use in the 2.4gHz spectrum. Haiti is the
opposite, an environment where the 2.4gHz spectrum is already
considerably overtaxed by heavy cellular and Internet users, densely
concentrated. The design of your app uses spectrum disproportionately
inefficiently, which is only okay if there's nobody else around. In a
desert, you can be as wasteful as you like, but in a city, what you're
doing would be really, really, antisocial.
Speaking very generally, the relaying of transmissions in a broadcast
environment with hidden transmitters is a very, very bad idea, if you
have any alternative whatsoever. Let's say that, for instance,
transmitting a message from one device to another device _that can see
each other_ across an already-established 802.11 network takes one
unit of bandwidth (where a "unit of bandwidth" is a frequency-range
multiplied by a duration). Transmitting the same message from one
device to another device that _cannot_ see each other, across an
already-established 802.11 network never takes more than two units of
bandwidth, no matter how far apart they are.
If you use end-nodes as repeaters, you start out in the same
position... Two nodes that can see each other can communicate using a
single unit of bandwidth, and two nodes that are separated by one
other node can communicate using two units of bandwidth. However, it
doesn't stop there. The further apart the two end-nodes are, the more
intermediate nodes consume additional units of bandwidth, to transmit
the same message. There's no additional value being created, yet the
cost keeps increasing without an upper bound. This is what killed
Ricochet, although they blew hundreds of millions of dollars trying to
minimize the effect, and their repeaters only operated at the
distribution layer, not at the local-loop layer, as yours are. Also,
if you're using both bluetooth and 802.11, you're vastly increasing
the frequency with which they'll clobber each other, because bluetooth
is frequency-hopping and 802.11 is direct-sequence. Bluetooth
clobbers 802.11 each time it transmits, causing 802.11 to back off and
retry. 802.11 behaves "conservatively," while bluetooth behaves
"aggressively," in broadcast Media Access Control terminology. The
area of study that you should probably read up on a bit, if you want
some background on how this stuff works, is CSMA, Carrier-Sense
Multiple Access. The two major methods are CSMA/CA and CSMA/CD,
Collision Avoidance and Collision Detection. 802.11 is CSMA/CA, which
means that it listens on the network for a period of time to try to
detect whether anyone else is transmitting, before it does so itself.
This works great as long as everybody is equally polite. Bluetooth is
not. Whenever Bluetooth has something to say, it just spams it out
there, assuming that everybody else is too far away to care. However,
if you have 802.11 speakers nearby, they'll all back off and wait, and
not be able to get any packets sent. So anything that increases
bluetooth usage (like by using it to retransmit data) nearby 802.11
networks is irresponsible, since bluetooth doesn't have a mechanism
for fair sharing of spectrum.
Engineers go to great lengths to avoid these situations. The Haitian
carriers, for instance, have a very carefully-engineered three-tier
network, in which both spectrum and path coordination are worked out
between all the stakeholders, and local-loop, distribution, and
backhaul networks are run in different areas of the spectrum.
Can you tell me what problem you're trying to solve? Is there some
reason why people wouldn't just use the existing networks? It seems
like the UI that you're presenting for communication is a really good
thing, but the way you're using the network is really damaging. Why
not just use the existing network, where it exists, and only go into
hobnailed-boot mode when there's no network?
-Bill
Alejandro Miranda
First of all i would like to thank you for your desire to help Haiti and the time you invested in this app, I'm sorry for the way Mr. Woodland reacted, I think it was sort of tough, anyway i would like to chat with you so that maybe we could integrate your system into a patient tracking system im developing for disaster situations in the future.
J Margolin
well, that's eyeopening - thanks for the education.
i'm glad alejandro has other ideas.