Personal Area Networks

In the past two weeks, I've become obsessed with Personal Area Networks. I've known about the concept of PANs much earlier than that, but beyond using a Bluetooth headset with my Blackberry (which I no longer own), I never had much reason to dabble with them.

Then, I read this article about a fellow who was traveling in a foreign country (Tibet? Nepal? Can't remember to be honest) and he was explaining how the people he met would use their Bluetooth phones to browse through and/or download the pictures on his cell phone. It struck me as a technological equivalent of clairvoyance-- what's the quote from Arthur C. Clarke? "Any sufficiently advanced technology becomes indistinguishable from magic" or something similar. Basically, this fellow comes within 30 feet of you, and if you want to, you can initiate a process that allows you to see snippets of what they have seen in the recent past.

Now, see, that's the thing-- you start talking about using Bluetooth to get rid of wires and have my cell phone "pair" with my headset, and I really don't get excited about it. It's convenient, but not exciting.

However, when you have an invisible presence that offers services to people around you automatically just by the mere fact of being in their vicinity-- now that's getting exciting. Sharing pictures is a good start, but what else could you do with it? Business card exchanges, of course, at the risk of being obvious. If you included a URL (blog/website/myspace page, whatever) in your business card, that could give people access to a more permanent version of your so-called invisible presence that didn't rely on your physical proximity.