Technofile: Many's the time I've gone to a conference or business event and been sure there was someone there I knew, but couldn't find. What I needed was a Star Trek-style scanner to sweep the area for contacts. Now Nokia has come up with exactly that.
It's easy to see where they got the idea. Two years ago a wave of interest surrounded a new craze called Bluejacking. Using Bluetooth-enabled phones, teenagers were getting kicks from sending bizarre messages to grown-ups, using the "send business card" facility on Nokia phones.
But the practice never became a mainstream form of communication, and fears of mobile viruses spreading were never truly realised.
But Nokia's new application is far slicker than old Bluejacking.
Nokia Sensor is an application you download from nokia.com/sensor. You can download it either to your phone "over the air" or to your PC for transfer to your mobile.
Once it's on the phone you create a little profile about yourself consisting of a picture and some text. This could be something personal to you, or perhaps even a sort of business card for what you do, or your company name.
Using Bluetooth, Sensor will then constantly broadcast this profile to everyone within a 10-metre range who also has the Sensor software.
Okay, so this sounds like a recipe for disaster, but think about it - if you are at a business event you get to see who else is there that might be interesting to talk to.
If you are mingling socially, perhaps at a nightclub, you can see what someone has to say about themselves before "bumping into them" at the bar (but don't get your hopes up, so-called "Toothing" - using Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones to arrange sexual encounters - was actually a media hoax).
One advantage is that you can message other Sensor users before chatting in the real world. There's also a guestbook and a file-sharing application, and a folder to "collect" Sensor users for later reference.
Crucially, anyone you don't want to communicate with over Sensor can be blocked. Sensor will also tell you if a Bluetooth device which is not a Sensor- enabled phone is in range.
One neat trick is that Sensor will actually graph when and how many times other Sensor users scan your profile, indicating your popularity.
Nokia claims Sensor will give rise to "spontaneous social circles" creating "instant communities and networks". But Sensor will also allow the sharing of content - whether that means people will start trading MP3 song files and other data over Sensor remains to be seen.
Of course, a huge drawback is that Sensor is a Nokia application, and will only run on certain phones - mostly phones in the Nokia 66 range.
Your phone will also need to have at least 1.3 MB of free memory (either on the MultiMediaCard or built-in phone memory).
But other software providers are getting in on the act, producing applications to allow communication over Bluetooth. Early attempts in Bluejacking are giving away to commercial applications.
Dublin-based NewBay Software last year launched FoneShare, an application which lets people share their collections of ringtones, graphics, games, songs, movie trailers and other wireless extras with strangers.
FoneShare is not a free for all, it's a subscription service which runs over mobile networks, and the sharing will be done via websites controlled by the mobile operator.
But it's far more likely that plain communication rather than file sharing will become the norm over Sensor. I'm looking forward to "sensing" a few colleagues at the next gadget festival.
