This article was 1st published on our sister Site, Digital World Native.
Bluetooth, beacons, all passe. There’s Chirp to transfer information between two smartphones.
Chirp is a data communications & sharing app that allows you to share photos, links, notes & more in the form of tiny sound chirps.
Don’t be mistaken, it’s not a messaging app per se because it’s not a private communication between 2 people. It’s built more to imitate human speech. You can send out a chirp, & anyone who is within range & has the Chirp app will receive it.
No doubt you’re thinking Bluetooth, but Chirp doesn’t need you to pair devices. Neither does it need you to type email addresses or add contacts from a list. You don’t need to find friends or followers or any of the other things that communications & messaging apps need.
Obviously it’s comparing apples & oranges, so let’s leave the messaging part alone for now & just focus on the broadcast part. It’s a 2-sec sound, & the recipient app just needs to hear it. It doesn’t necessarily have to come from your phone.
For example, the company has launched a Chirp extension for Chrome, which you can install on your Web browser. You can send a Chirp from your laptop, or a PA system, radio or YouTube or whatever. Any phone with a Chirp app that hears it will receive the chirp & be able to decode it.
It vastly expands the scope of how far & wide your link, photo or note could potentially be shared again & again. It helps that the Chirp app is already very popular & has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times by users in 180 countries.
For the record, the app allows social sharing, so if you have received a chirp, you can share it on Facebook or Twitter just by tapping the ‘Share’ button. Also, it has plenty of potential to expand on this & allow secure messaging & even payments to be transferred using Chirp. The company has furthermore released SDKs for Android & iOS developers, so it’s possible that it may be used in a whole lot of other apps.
Chirp was developed by London, U.K.-based Animal Systems, founded in 2010 by Patrick Bergel, an honorary Research Associate at University College London, to commercialize the Chirp project that was originally a research project in the UCL computer science department.
Animal Systems is currently seeking to raise £400,000 from equity investors on the Crowdcube platform. As of now, the project has already raised £285,610 from 154 investors, with 28 days still to go.
Click here to download the Chirp app for iOS from the App Store.
Click here to download the Android app from Google Play.
Click here to get the Chrome extension.
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