Silicon Valley Musings

Here are a couple ideas for RSVP and BuddyBuzz.

Mail

Reading mail on your phone would is currently very difficult. A RSVP/BuddyBuzz-based email reader would is an obvious improvement for some people.

Dual Camera Phones

I noticed recently that the phone manufacturers are starting to build “dual camera” or “frontal VGA-camera” phones. The second camera is lower resolution and faces the user. It is intended for video conferencing.

Here are two Nokia and Sony Ericsson examples.

For BuddyBuzz, the second camera could be combined with rudimentary gaze tracking or face recognition. If the camera doesn’t see a face, it would pause BuddyBuzz until a face returns.

Bluetooth

Many phones now support Bluetooth.

I found this Bluetooth pen interesting, as well as this handwriting recognition software

You could image people sending each other notes in a meeting, class, or conference using their Bluetooth pens. The results would be displayed on the each other’s phone using BuddyBuzz.

You can provide location-based content using Bluetooth and kiosks. See Wideray’s system as an example. I can imagine loading all your class readings or conference notes to your phone when you enter an event. This would eliminate the need for downloading large amounts of content over the air. It could also be a way of distributing new versions of BuddyBuzz.

Touch Sensations

San Jose-based Immersions provides the VibeTonz Studio SDK for adding touch sensations to mobile devices.

I don’t have any ideas on how this could be integrated into BuddyBuzz except maybe making specific sensations for new stories, predefined keywords, ads, etc.

Games

I have been trying to design a BuddyBuzz based game.

I have been thinking about a BuddyBuzz treasure hunt. Each location would hold a new key (really an article id) that would unlock a BuddyBuzz-based clue.

The clue can be displayed on a single handset, or two or three players could partner up and have their clue displayed on a single handset. For the teams, the clue would be separated into two or three sections, each displayed at the same time in two or three rows.

This would encourage the partners to crowd around a single handset, faces pressed together, to get their clue in one half or one-third the time. I think kids would love this.

Another more educational (read boring) BuddyBuzz-based game would be flashcards for learning a foreign language.

Buddybuzz would display a word in English and then below it would use RSVP to display a series of words in Spanish, French, etc. One of the words would be the translation of the English word. The student would select a button when they saw the translation.

BuddyBuzz would cycle through the series of words and eliminate one of the erroneous choices each cycle until it displayed the correct translation. The student would get points for accuracy and speed.

I have also thought of a “hot or not” type game. BuddyBuzz would display words using RSVP that are from two predefined categories. The player would use the two select buttons to select the correct category for each word. Examples include “Nouns vs Verbs”, “Prime Numbers vs Composite Numbers”, “Real vs Fictional People”, and “Famous Stanford Alumni vs Famous Berkeley Alumni”.

The same game could use thumbnail images instead of (or in addition to) words.

Again the player would get points based on speed and accuracy.