Why use People Near Me?

Some examples of scenarios that People Near Me (PNM) enables are the following:

  • Initiate chat with a person in a conference room during a meeting. Use a chat application to dynamically discover other users in the room, select a specific user, and begin a chat session to collaborate or exchange information.
  • The PNM API allows document sharing with everyone in your conference room. Although Universal Serial Bus (USB) flash drives (UFDs) make it very easy to transfer documents between computers in a closed setting, such as a meeting, it still takes time and effort to plug the UFD into each computer and copy the document to a local folder. With applications capable of PNM, you can select the users in the room with which you want to share or send a document.
  • Stream the information on the desktop of a machine to a coworker's computer for resource sharing.
  • Start a game with someone during a layover at an airport terminal that supports wireless connectivity. The PNM API allows an application to advertise your interest in playing a game, discover others at the airport who are also interested in playing the game, and start a gaming session.
  • Advertise interests at an industry conference and discover those of others using wireless connectivity. After discovery, users are able to chat or set up impromptu meetings to exchange ideas.