Discussion of WiFi Tag/Beacons

This is a talk by Adam Rea about some new hardware that might be interesting for new research. It's a matchbook-sized device that runs a Wi-Fi access point and a web server and some basic I/O. It's sort of like the iMote with Wi-Fi. It costs about $80.00. It's could be a high-bandwidth localized data source. It has the perennial problem of power consumption for ubiquitous computing devices.

In my opinion, the key interesting feature of this device is that it could be the authoritative source of data for something that you don't want to be available to the greater world. The data would have to quickly lose value as it got old because you are making it available locally and it would be easy to transmit once you had copy of it. The only thing that springs to mind that is like this are grocery store prices. It might be nice for a customer to know what the prices of everything in a store are when you walk into the store, but the grocery store doesn't want that information getting out because it would enable people to comparison shop without coming to the physical location. Someone who walked into the store could transmit that information to someone outside the store, but the prices would quickly grow stale and unreliable.

I am not overwhelmed by the impact of this class of data, though, so I don't think there is a lot of interesting research to be done here.