Technical Report: GeoMe - Post-it notes on the street

Abstract

With the mobile market growing, internet access in urban areas improving in Ireland and Worldwide, much more attractive mobile internet plans and the number of mobile apps downloaded each year increasing by 30%~ per year since 2012 (63,958 mil) to 2015 (179,628 mil) proves that people love their apps and use them daily. Combined with a recent study that showed that the average time spent on mobile phones by users worldwide is 90 minutes a day or a staggering 23 days a year, gave me an idea to use this statistics to provide an application for these users that would allow them to interact anonymously with each other based on their daily travel, mobile usage and places they visit by utilizing their mobile phones geo-location that would allow for them to leave messages for others to pick up with their devices as they pass the geo-location the message was left at. These messages can range from geocaching for prizes and competitions, events happening later in the area that day, giving small reviews of local shops, cafes and restaurants. Share discount codes and promotions, advertise any personal belongings or rooms to rent, that any passer by would already be in the neighbourhood and could see the house in person and decide if it’s suitable for them. Or maybe inscriptions and poems for others to read and share. And with messages having a short-to-medium life span, would make each day a new experience as only the latest notes left by other users would be picked up the mobile device. Creating a sense of excitement and surprise whenever the user receives a notification of a new Geo-location based message they received. With the popularity of other geo based application such as Swarm, Yik-Yak and Google places, I believe mobile app users would be very interested in this concept. And thus this gave birth to GeoMe, a native android application for anonymous social sharing of text, bound to geofences spread around cities and countries