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Spaces — Broadcast useful things to everyone nearby, in real time
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Enrique Dubois
Love it Roy, congrats! I see many use cases that all other location based social apps have in mind. The simplicity and no signup requirement is very neat.
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@enriquedubois Thanks Enrique! Even though Spaces touches on many location-based use cases, it's not super social. The focus is on solving one-to-many location-based communication (that's still paper dominated in 2015).
Hey guys!
I would love to hear your thoughts on my new app, Spaces. Spaces lets you broadcast useful information to everyone in the room, in real time.
In meetups, education and public spaces, one-to-many distribution of content is still dominated by paper but the content that we distribute is increasingly digital - many links, files and photos. Also, it's impossible to change printed handouts in the moment. Spaces' objective is to solve this problem.
When building Spaces, I tried to keep things as simple as possible - all you need to view the content is to be in the same room with the app installed and bluetooth turned on (no GPS, no push, no need to open an account etc). There's a basic but easy to use editor and you can begin broadcasting with just one tap. To broadcast, Spaces uses a low energy bluetooth signal that has very little impact on your phone's battery. Additionally, Spaces also supports broadcasting with Estimote iBeacons. Any changes you do update for everyone in real time.
The real opportunity here I think is in wearables. It'll be super cool to be able to view site-specific live content on your wrist - agendas at events, menus at restaurants etc. I just finished working on the Spaces Apple Watch app and it should be available when the watch is released next month.
Looking forward to hearing from everyone.
tl;dr Spaces are a live, disposable, room-specific replacement for paper handouts.
@marmelroy this is a fantastic idea! Can you provide more context around how it utilizes the Estimote beacons? Is this for extending the range or something else?
@srcasm Thanks Jesse! The support for Estimote is there for two reasons - the first is to extend range and the second is to support more permanent Spaces.
It makes sense to broadcast with your phone if you're doing it temporarily (like in a meetup or a small event) but I think Spaces will be really useful for public venues too and for them it'll be much easier to just place an Estimote beacon in the room (e.g. cafes posting menus and wifi codes, gig venues posting schedule for tonight and download links etc).
@marmelroy so you can use the app to program the Estimote beacon? And then it retains the space? Can the beacon only have one owner?
@srcasm Almost. The app can assign the Space you created to your Estimote beacon's signal (without programming the beacon). For now, the beacon can only have one owner (whoever claims it first) but I'm not 100% sure about that policy, might change it.
