Project Idea

[Brad Marsh]

Hello again. Well since the whole purpose of the meetup was to get
together to share ideas and such, I'm posting this cause I had an idea
for a potential project and I was hoping to get some thoughts/
opinions.

Here's the idea. Chat roulette and other random chats are getting
huge, as are location based apps like loopt and 4square. Why not
combine them using wifi hotspots?

For example I'm in a Caribou Coffee right now and I'd say well over
half the room are staring at laptop screens. Why not build a service
that allows people to "introduce" themselves via an anonymous chat to
other people on their local wifi connection?

As a sort of case study. There is a restaurant in Indianapolis thats
called Max and Ermas that does this exact thing with phones. Each
table has a phone on it and a number above the table. Half the fun of
going to the restaurant is talking to other random diners.

Thoughts, criticisms, whatever let me know.

Thanks,

Brad

[Ian Dees]

I've been pondering this for quite some time but as a location-aware chat room (not tied to an access point). You could start a new discussion or leave a message at a location using your cellphone (with GPS) or laptop (with geolocation from wifi). Others in the area could a) get alerts when new threads get posted or b) could see it when they move through the area.

The interesting part would be how far to cast a particular discussion's net: how close do you need to be before you see the discussion? A couple options:

1) A user has "lung capacity" (or some less dumb-sounding name). If you want to yell something really loud and reach more people, yell louder (and use more of your lung capacity). As time goes on, your lung capacity fills back up. Small, localized whispers barely use any of your capacity.

2) As more users reply to a thread, the "cloud of discussion" expands to cover the people that replied. As a discussion gets more posts, presumably the cloud would be larger and more people would see it.

You could monetize this by selling commercial accounts to places like Caribou coffee so that people in the store or going past it could get notifications or by offering services on top of it that stream location data in: weather, traffic, sports, etc.

-Ian

[Jake Dahn]

I really like this idea, it's like bringing the interwebs to the real world. As a user it would make sitting around in a coffee shop much more fun and interactive.

Instead of tying it to a single wifi hotspot I think it would be cool to expand it to a city block or something. Expanding a bit would make it easy for users to meet new people and explore the town with others vs. just saying hi from across the room.

__

Thanks,

Jake Dahn

ja...@ang.st

(612)-272-1534

[Mitchell Hislop]

Thinking about the tech behind this, it would not be too hard to pull this off. I would not know how, but I can visualize how this would work. 

If you do the city block idea, you could have the option to display where on that block you are via skyhook

Mitchell Hislop
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[Brad Marsh]

I think from a tech perspective, you could do this a couple ways. The
original thought I had for tracking a real location by wifi hotspots
was to track the MAC address of the original router. Since these are
all unique and obtaining the MAC of a user's router is technically a
simple process, I thought this might work.

On Jul 22, 12:22 pm, Mitchell Hislop <mi...@mitchellhislop.com> wrote:
> Thinking about the tech behind this, it would not be too hard to pull this
> off. I would not know how, but I can visualize how this would work.
>
> If you do the city block idea, you could have the option to display where on
> that block you are via skyhook
>

> Mitchell Hislop
> Geek
> 612.418.4992
> [image: Facebook] <http://facebook.com/mitchellhislop>[image:
> Twitter]<http://twitter.com/mitchellhislop>[image:
> LinkedIn] <http://www.linkedin.com/in/mitchellhislop>[image:
> Tungle.me]<http://tungle.me/mitchellhislop>

> My Latest Post: My New

> Desktop<http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/folkweb/aqfo/~3/y3pe3PgXv1U/>
> Signature powered by WiseStamp <http://www.wisestamp.com/email-install>

>
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 12:16 PM, Jake Dahn <j...@ang.st> wrote:
> > I really like this idea, it's like bringing the interwebs to the real
> > world. As a user it would make sitting around in a coffee shop much more fun
> > and interactive.
>
> > Instead of tying it to a single wifi hotspot I think it would be cool to
> > expand it to a city block or something. Expanding a bit would make it easy
> > for users to meet new people and explore the town with others vs. just
> > saying hi from across the room.
>
> > __
>
> > Thanks,
> > Jake Dahn

> > j...@ang.st

[Ian Dees]

If you visit through a modern web browser (on laptop or mobile) you can use the HTML5 geolocation API. I know that Firefox has supported it for a while and Chrome has recently added support for it.

That way you wouldn't need to install software for the system to work on a customer's PC.

[Daniel Feldman]

There are already tons of location-based chat services, none of which
have been able to get up to critical mass (BrightKite is the biggest).

In order to get enough users for this chat service to be worthwhile, I
think you'd need marketing help from the coffee shops themselves. Each
participating shop could get a fancy branded chat page that shows up
as the first page you get to when you use their wi-fi, along with
informational posters and table tents. Challenges:

1) How to sell this to the coffee shops? They mostly don't want to
encourage wi-fi use -- users take up valuable table space and don't
spend a lot. I even know of shops that turn off their routers at busy
times just for this reason! Maybe advertising on the chat screen for
menu items could help. (I'm at a coffee shop now, I'm pretty sure if a
slice of chocolate cake appeared on my screen I'd go up to the counter
and buy it!)

2) Moderation. There are always going to be troublemakers, and it's
not like you can expect a barista to make drinks and moderate a chat
room at the same time. So the company providing this would want to
have a flagging system monitored by real human beings somewhere.

3) Monetization. If you want to have the chat site show up when a user
logs in to the coffee shop wi-fi, that means buying a router for the
coffee shop and maybe subsidizing their internet connection. Can ads
alone pay for it?

I think it might do okay as a niche product, for environments like
university campus coffee shops which really serve as a meeting space
and are in intense competition with neighboring shops.
-- Daniel

--
Daniel Feldman
(612) 217-1707

[Mitchell Hislop]

As a university student, that is a great idea. 

Mitchell Hislop
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[Aaron Brethorst]

I think there's some overlap between this idea and a startup in Seattle called CoCollage. If someone here is sufficiently interested, I'd be happy to make an intro between them and CoCollage's founder, Tyler.

http://www.cocollage.com/

[Brad Marsh]

Another thought I just had. Because the target user of this app would
be people hanging out in a coffee shop or somewhere on a campus, it
might be good to build it as a facebook app as most of the people are
going to have that application up anyway.

Could probably find some way of making use of the their API for a kind
of "temporary friend" chat.

Thoughts?

On Jul 22, 2:00 pm, Aaron Brethorst <aa...@brethorsting.com> wrote:
> I think there's some overlap between this idea and a startup in Seattle called CoCollage. If someone here is sufficiently interested, I'd be happy to make an intro between them and CoCollage's founder, Tyler.
>
> http://www.cocollage.com/
>
> On Jul 22, 2010, at 1:53 PM, Mitchell Hislop wrote:
>
> > As a university student, that is a great idea.
>

> > Mitchell Hislop
> > Geek
> > 612.418.4992

>
> > My Latest Post: My New Desktop
> > Signature powered by WiseStamp
>