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The first bluetooth-enabled pub display

Look carefully at the image in this story. It appears to show a young man, with a phone in his hand, standing underneath an Impressionist painting. Actually, it's a highly sophisticated Mesh network in action, including phones as part of the mesh.

And the image is actually an photo of Jon Anderson and his colleague, Adrian Potts. It was taken seconds earlier with a Nokia 7650 camera-phone.

Then it was instantly transmitted to the Mesh box under the pub counter, using the phone's bluetooth wireless link. And a few moments later, it was added to the "gallery" of images which people in the pub had been taking of each other.

If you had a pub like this, how cool would your customers think it might be? And suppose you could send them vouchers for free drinks if they win competitions? or warn them of "last orders" by phone?

The trick was pulled off for the first time today, in the Progress Bar, in Tufnell Park, London -as a result of collaboration between Conrad Palmer's two-pub chain, and the revolutionaries of LocustWorld.

"It's basically our first answer to the question: 'What could I do with a single Mesh box?' said marketing boss, Richard Lander. "Jon has worked out how to put a Bluetooth access port onto the Mesh, and this is the first experiment at what you might be able to do with it."

A Mesh box is a computer with wireless, which looks for other computers with wireless, and links up to them making a network. A network of one computer might seem to be a silly idea. However, if LocustWorld doesn't find a useful reason for installing single Mesh boxes, it's hard to see how the swarm of locusts can build up.

But pubs love wireless Internet, because it attracts customers during the afternoons, when they are otherwise empty. And the Meshbox is a very neat way of providing Internet access - all you need beyond the £250 PC is a broadband link and a cheap WiFi access point.

And now, you can add Bluetooth and suddenly, MMS works. Admittedly, at the moment, multimedia messaging is either expensive, or restricted to the pub where the Meshbox is sitting; but that, of course, is rather the point.

"Eventually, it will be possible to send voice messages - not just to other Bluetooth phone users in the local pub, but out across the Internet," said Jon Anderson, looking somewhat shaggy after a night when he finished his hardware/software tweaks only around 4 AM.

Right now, the project is in early development, and if you weren't a nerd like Conrad Palmer (who else would call his hostelry after the "download progress" bar on a computer?) you might find the user interface a little taxing. Then again, if you can manage to operate a Nokia 7650 camera-phone ...

Watch this space. It may only work on one phone, in one bar today; but it won't stop there. It really looks like it might keep people amused on those nights when there's nothing but football on the big screen in the bar ...

The users can send any picture to the "gallery?" Oh, yes. "But we can send coded commands to the Meshbox by transmitting business cards from the phone which perform preset actions," said Lander. "For example, we can delete inappropriate photographs ... "

Oh, rats ...