Rococo

Watches

Watches will be big for Bluetooth - trust me - especially once the Ultra Low Power stuff is integrated in to the standard. In the meantime, we're beginning to see products from Fossil and this latest one from Turtle Wireless.

Printers

Polaroid have announced a ZINK (zero ink) based Digital Instant Photo printer that uses Bluetooth, among other things. Ideal for printing small photos from cameras wirelessly.

Robots

- The Spykee will let you move and sneak around taking pictures to be sent to your mobile phone.
- Similar in some ways to the Sony Ericsson Rob-1, mentioned here before

Industrial

See the Schenck Bulk Solid Metering control - evidence of more "traction" for Bluetooth in Industrial or machine-to-machine applications

And finally

Bluetooth madness: XMPP based Jabber Powered Bluetooth Doorbell

Posted by Sean at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Very nice implementation of a game called Rolling Ball, winner of a Mobile Application Contest at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. Uses Bluetooth in Multiplayer mode to enable person to person play. Reminds me of a game from long ago called Marble Madness (trackball heaven).

Video of it in action here, details on the project here.

Posted by Sean at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Eh, ok.

So it turns out that Bluetooth has been used for sending messages "of a sexual nature" in various places in Riyadh over the last while. A local study in the Al-Qasim region (northeast of Riyadh) intercepted 500 Bluetooth messages, of which 90 percent were sexual in nature.

The fantastically-named Riyadh Branch of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, who once were perceived as being anti-Bluetooth, have now embraced the technology as a potential force for good.

To that end, they're trialling a new service called the "Awareness Messaging System via Bluetooth" to spread, well, "awareness messages" to young people visiting on of Riyadh's largest shopping centers. Presumably the messages will say things like: "Think pure thoughts" and so forth.

As someone reared in Ireland (ninety-x percent Catholic, historically), I can respectfully suggest that this is a total waste of everyone's time. That sniggering sound you hear is the sound of local youths gleefully deleting "awareness messages".

Cool though. Report here.

Posted by Sean at 04:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)