Your PDA: A Wireless Web and Music Server
June 4th, 2004Imagine sharing the collection of MP3 music files that you listen to on your PDA wirelessly with anyone nearby. Imagine converting that PDA into your own mobile, wireless Web server, through which anyone nearby who has a wi-fi enabled laptop or device can browse and download whatever Web pages, photos or other content that you choose to offer up.
A new application called Pocket Rendezvous allows you to do that. This is exciting because it takes the mobile personal Web server paradigm (as seen in Intel’s Personal Servers and in Julian Bleecker’s Wi-fi Bedouin project), and rolls it out in a form that will run on mobile devices that thousands of people already use.
But get this: while Pocket Rendezvous uses the device discovery and networking protocol most famous for its use in Apple’s Rendezvous system, Pocket Rendezvous runs only on (Microsoft) PocketPC devices! How darkly ironic… Nonetheless, bravo to Simeda, the small German software firm behind Pocket Rendezvous. I hope they port this to PalmOS soon so I can use it on my wi-fi enabled Palm.
(Thanks to Joe, Howard and The Register for the tip.)
I share your excitement at the possibilities. The rendezvous app definitely needs to be ported to Palm.
Would that mean it would most likely have to be a Bluetooth app instead of, or in addition to WiFi?
Not that I’m a total BT partisan, but I think we’re more likely to see BT across the line in Palm devices than WiFi. And BT is less battery drain, which could matter in this application where one might want to leave the radio on much of the time.
Anyway, I hope you’ll watch this thing — simba or sumatra or whatever the heck they call their company — and keep reporting on it.
The way to do things is to begin.
Sean, a related effort is tunA – I’m not sure what the status of the project is, but these sorts of idioms of proximity-based sharing/sociable networks are exciting! Stand by for more developments..
Sean, a related effort is tunA – I’m not sure what the status of the project is, but these sorts of idioms of proximity-based sharing/sociable networks are exciting! Stand by for more developments..