Not only will this app find nearby restaurants, it can also tell you whether your friends are at the same party -- without having to check-in. It knows where the heck you left your car. Most importantly, it is able to do all this without battery-sucking technologies like GPS.
ToothTag is a treasure trove of proximity-based information. It goes beyond regular location services and novel-but-worthless check-ins, showing you what's in your immediate surroundings and giving you multiple options for how to make that information truly useful. Instead of GPS, it relies on Bluetooth, Near Field Communication (NFC), and WiFi. Power management -- long the bane of innovative mobile apps -- has been ToothTag's plan from the start.
The app lets you tag Bluetooth and Wi-Fi devices -- such as headsets, laptops, mobile phones, and access points. Once these are tagged, you can set up automated actions when you're within a given distance from them. Automated actions, such as mobile alerts or emails, can occur without your ever having to think about the app.
Here are a few examples:
ToothTag is free and available right now in the Android Market. Creator Dave "Gadget Guy" Mathews says his company, NeuAer will be working on an iPhone version, but ToothTag's system requirements aren't entirely met by the iPhone 4. The app is built on a unique proximity platform called, interestingly enough, ProxPlatform. This platform will allow devs to add "presence events" to their applications.
ToothTag is meant to serve as a use case for what ProxPlatform is capable of doing. The possibilities are exciting as they are lucrative.
ToothTag's features could be tweaked for AR mobile gaming, mobile commerce and other types of mobile apps. Mathews and team hope to make money from the proximity platform rather than the consumer app. They plan to introduce a MySQL-style freemium model soon.