A team of five engineers from Berkeley, California, has founded a start-up called Iota Labs to manufacture a device called Dot that will use location tracking to make notifications from a smartphone contextual.
The company has launched a Kickstarter project to raise money for the manufacture of the device and have crossed their goal of US$20,000 nearly four times over with 14 days still left.
Dot is a small beacon-like device which can be fixed to any surface and is detected by a smartphone when the user gets within a specified distance. A push notification is then triggered, depending on context.
It uses Bluetooth 4 for detection and saves the user having to constantly attend to notifications that pop up randomly.
{loadposition sam08}The notification can be set through an app that is based on the IFTTT (If this, then that) principle.
More than one person can use a single Dot which has an embedded LED that provides information through a change of colour.
There are apps for both iOS and Android to use with Dot which is expected to be available by March 2017.
Each device costs US$20 and the creators say they will ship it to any location.