Reach for Retail back to all projects People are more connected than ever by increasingly powerful mobile systems, yet broad swaths of human scale interactions remain elusive. Namely we cannot intelligently discover useful people and resources that are out of sight, but nearby and available. To enable this communication modality requires sending messages "intentionally", meaning that the sender does not specify the recipient, instead she counts on the system to route the message to the person in the best possible position to understand and action her intent. To realize this communication modality we propose Reach, a proximal messaging system hyper-focused on choosing recipients based both on the relevance of the message and their utility to the sender.

The video above shows an early demonstration of this system as presented to the "Future of Retail: Getting Physical" as "Here, There and Everywhere. Local networking". The idea was to demonstrate how a proximal networking system of this type could function in a retail environment. We presented use cases surrounding users publishing feeds of needs and opportunities linked to thier personal presence as well as the places they frequent. These feeds can be consumed by other people as well as applications that can mediate and act on that information. In our retail model, the store is mediating the user's announcement that they are intrested in discussing a recent electronics purchase by offering an incentive for them to have that discussion in thier store with a potential customer. We envisioned a second scenario where the user can advertise an item for sale and that the store could then inturn announce this item in thier store, offering an extended warrenty to the potential buyer, thereby allowing the staid retail environment to transform into a marketplace reinvigortaed by the dynamics of online behavior.

This project was created using Tornado, Cassandra, JQuery, Twilio, Python, HTML5

I am currently working on a version of Reach that will be deployable on networks such as Foursquare and Google Latitude with functionality geared towards people doing good deeds for eachother. Watch this space.

back to all projects