Allow me to tell you about a fun new technology called Chirp created by some good friends of ours.
Chirp is an exciting new technology that shares information between devices using sound and you can try it out for yourself.
Chirp works by using little more than your device’s speaker and microphone. Data is encoded into a sound which is then “chirped” over the speaker. Another device or devices within earshot will “hear” that sound and decode it.
The beauty of this is that it removes all technical obstacles to sharing data (no need for infrared, or setting up bluetooth etc) and makes it possible for the most basic devices (think Arduino boards, toys, TVs, games etc) to chirp without any special hardware. And it means that one device can very easily share data with multiple listening devices.
You can share URLs, notes, images and video between devices – and now from your desktop web browser. College lecturers and presenters find it very useful for sharing links to websites, slides and presentations to their delegates, without having to collect email addresses or use any special infrastructure.
You can download the free Chirp app from the Apple Store or Google Play to see it in action. It’s great fun! There’s also a Chrome Plugin which makes it a breeze to share links from your web browser to your phone/tablet.
And if you want to make your own apps chirp there’s an SDK you can get your hands on too. I had some fun not long back making a Lego EV3 Robot chirp. Why not!? Anyone for a Macro Scheduler -> Chirp Interface?
And if you like what you see why not get in on the action – Team Chirp are currently crowd funding to raise money to take Chirp to the next level and are exploring commercial opportunities – so you can even make a little investment.
