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DroidLane CB : In-traffic Voice feeds

PostPosted: September 10th, 2009, 9:48 am
by gunnar
DroidLane CB (CB as in "Citizens Band") is perhaps the most spectacular feature of the DroidLane mobile application. It enables user sharing of voice communication. Any DroidLane app user presses a button to talk. Such "user voice posts" become uploaded wirelessly onto a central server and are instantly made available as Voice Feeds to other DroidLane users who share a certain in-traffic location proximity. In the application such a message is categorised by its initiator as belonging to a certain Channel.
Channels is the way the DroidLane system organizes CB dialogs so that listeners have a way of getting a feed that match their interest and/or standards. It is possible for a user to block input from a specific DroidLane CB user as a way to keep perceived garbage out of his/her favourite DroidLane Chat channels. Each message is tagged with the identity of its initiator, making such filtering easy. The mantra for DroidLane CB is: "Keep your hands on the wheel and eyes on the road, let your voice do the talking and ears receive the responses" :)

In other words; a kind of good old CB revisited (Citizens Band), a long gone culture that could somehow be reincarnated here. A top prio tech challenge is accomplishing a low enough latency for something that has a chance to remotely resemble real CB to occur.

Wifi will be exploited to allow a premium version of DroidLane CB (better bandwith, lower latency). Some high tech DroidLane users will run Wifi hotspots in their cars. A DroidLane app feature scans for the proximity of such hotspots and autoconnects to that users mobile DroidLane proxy server(!), to allow DroidLane CB traffic via that network.
Typically such in-car Wifi hotspots include a 3G modem that means that hotspot could radiate quite ample downlink capacity, thus at the courtesy of its owner be able to facilitate CB monitoring for nearby in-traffic DroidLane users.