Low tech sometimes succeeds where high tech fails – as one ingenious company is proving.
Chirp sends data over sound, a burst of audio that usually sounds like a bird's tweet. It doesn't transmit much data – 50 bytes – but it turns out you don't need much bandwidth to bridge the gaps between the real world and the digital world.
Chirp has already been put to use, and unusually for a small company, boasts hundreds of millions of users. Spun out of research at UCL, Chirp first stepped into the public eye four years ago with a consumer app. But it recently switched to a B2B model – licensing the technology for use in all kinds of cases via a software development kit.
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Sound has obvious disadvantages. One is that it needs to deal with noise interference, which is everywhere. And in the open, the range is short: 10 to 20 feet. But the big advantage is easy to miss: the audio bursts are a one-to-many, multidirectional transmission. So Chirps can be used as a signal – say a trigger, or a wake up call – for millions of digital devices at once. It can be played at a stadium, for example.
(Score: 1) by marknmel on Friday November 11 2016, @05:47PM
Your done before has been done before. In fact it was the Germans in WW2. They had the Hellschreiber. More or less a fax machine over radio communications such as short wave. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellschreiber/ [wikipedia.org]
There is nothing that can't be solved with one more layer of indirection.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday November 12 2016, @09:04AM
Fixed and "de-mobilized" link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellschreiber [wikipedia.org]
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.