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Bluetooth Proximity Marketing Solutions
We get asked quite regularly about Bluetooth-based Proximity Marketing Solutions. Rococo doesn't actually make or sell these, but some of our customers do, and so we typically refer people to them.
So - I though t might be useful to share our standard "form response" to enquires about Bluetooth Proximity Marketing Solutions. There's quite a range of them out there these days, and for the laugh and because we're slightly mad, we plan to try out a few of them over the next few months. So if there's one missing from my list - let me know and we'll take a look at it.
Meanwhile - here's some unstructured notes about these and some comments on some of the ones we know about. We also try and keep a list of links for these alive at http://delicious.com/sos100/proximity_marketing%20
Let's recap what these things are:
They are a combination of hardware and software which is designed to let a Marketer or Someone Who Wants To Promote Something send messages over Bluetooth to nearby mobile phones. Doesn't have to be a mobile phone of course, but that's the typical use-case. The idea is you're walking in a mall, and suddenly have a special offer beamed to your mobile phone from one of the stores nearby.
That's the basic idea. Send some little digital "micro-ad" to a phone, ideally where the ad is relevant to something close by (Bluetooth range is around 10 metres or 30 feet).
After the basic, you can fancy-up the solutions: instead of a little ad, the item sent to the user could be a little application that does something, or a video clip, or a photo. where it's an application, that application could also then enable the user to interact with the marketing system, to ask for specific product information, or to fill out a mini-survey and send it back. And so on.
The use cases are typically around the following areas - so far:
- Selling stuff: this includes Malls and Retail environments, to enable shops to send offers and promotions to people near them, but also includes public spaces, bus stops for example - again send messages and offers to people waiting at the bus stop.
- Promoting things: Cinemas and Hotels use them to promote (respectively) Videos and Ringtones for the movies on offer, or local restaurants and services convenient to the hotel
- Driving user interaction: Nike have used it in New York to power a design-your-own-shoe display; you download an application and then use it to design your own show, which is displayed on the big video board. Alternatively, at concerts, it's been used to enable attendees to post messages on video boards at the event.
And so on. There are various other scenarios you can imagine, but they're mostly variations on a theme. The better ones use the inherent fact that they know you are nearby and that you may be temped in to some marketing or purchasing action on the spot.
Anyway - without further ado - here's some of the off-the-shelf solutions we know of:
BlueMedia (Ireland)
- They offer typical retail-oriented solution; well tried and tested in a variety of markets; dedicated proximity marketing boxes attached to a central PC server; excellent reference sites with quality brand names:
- http://www.bluemedia.ie/
BluePodMedia:
- http://www.bluepodmedia.com/
- As used in football stadia in the UK http://www.engadget.com/2008/01/18/bluepod-media-brings-bluetooth-to-football-stadiums/
- They also did some cinema stuff: http://www.abce-ireland.ie/cgi-bin/gen5?runprog=abce/abce&type=page&p=news_111007.html&menuid=news|n1|news_111007|news_111007
Qwikker (used by CBS Outdoor among others)
- http://www.qwikker.com/
- http://www.cbsoutdoor.co.uk/web/Current-news/Newspage-UK/Viacom-Outdoor-launches-Bluetooth-Network-on-London-Underground.htm
- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/tayside_and_central/7228905.stm
Proximitymedia
- http://proximitymedia.com/home.htm
HueTouch (basic Bluetooth campaigns...)
- http://www.huetooth.com/bluetooth-proximity-marketing-Huetouch-express.php
BlueMoz (Italy)
- A new one on me: http://www.bluemoz.it/english/index.php
Anyway - you get the idea. A bunch of stuff available, which may do a subset or all of what you want, off the shelf, and will come with manuals, support, etc.
Alternatively, people sometimes look at getting a custom-built solution. Often this is driven by the need to have an application be downloaded to the phone. One of the key issues here is that you'll be forced to deal with the full gamut of software development variable such as how to support all the models of phones that will try to use the application (e.g. a survey)?
An evolving area; we'll do some in-depth reviews of a few of them over the next few months.
Rococo and MicroDoc partner to add JSR82 to IBM Websphere Everyplace Custom Environment
We've been working with IBM, and in particular, their J9 team for many years. As a recap, Rococo's implementation of JSR82 is the preferred JSR82 solution for the J9 Virtual Machine. Of course, I still call them the "J9 team" as I'm an old fogey. IBM calls that stuff the Websphere Everyplace Custom Environment, or WECE, which is of course easier to remember. Not. :-)
Anyway, some years back IBM introduced us to MicroDoc. Based in Munich, they're a specialist in all things embedded, and were IBM's first European Business Partner for everything related to their Embedded Java platform. The MicroDoc team are great people to work with, and have "embedded" in their DNA.
So we're delighted to finally announce, with MicroDoc, the availability of WECE with JSR82 built-in. It's been an annoyance for WECE customers seeking JSR82 to have to get a custom-build of the combined solution, and so ourselves and MicroDoc have created an off-the-shelf version that we think will help customers get up and running faster and more cost-effectively than they could before. We also think it's timely, as we've seen some encouraging increase in demand for applying Bluetooth in WECE-based systems in a variety of industry scenarios.
So from here on out, if you're looking for a "one-stop-shop" for WECE with JSR82, talk to MicroDoc.
http://www.microdoc.com/
Official Press Release follows.
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October 28th 2008, Munich, Germany and Dublin, Ireland
Rococo Software Limited and MicroDoc GmbH have announced the general availability of IBM’s Websphere Everyplace Custom Environment (WECE) Runtime with built-in support for the industry standard Java/Bluetooth APIs (JSR82). MicroDoc, an IBM Global Porting Partner, and Rococo, a leading supplier of Java/Bluetooth technology, have partnered for several years to offer Java/Bluetooth technology to MicroDoc's WECE customers. However, this offering is the first time an "off the shelf" version of WECE has been made available with JSR82 support. This enables companies in the embedded marketplace to take advantage of the JSR82 APIs "out of the box", and create solutions with a lower total cost and lead time to delivery.
"As Java and Bluetooth have become more pervasive in the embedded marketplace, we have seen more demand for WECE with Bluetooth support as standard" said Hans Kamutzki, ceo of MicroDoc. "Often there's a lead-time to create a custom version of the JVM that can meet their needs, especially with Bluetooth" he said, "with this release, they can get up and running much more quickly, and at a lower overall cost for their solution".
Microdoc supports cross industry embedded Java users with customized VMs. MicroDoc products are sold in particular in the automotive sector, in transport and logistics, telecommunications and in the consumer market.
"We've worked with WECE and MicroDoc for many years", said Sean O Sullivan, CTO with Rococo. "There's been a steady increase in interest in the embedded Java platform, especially in the automotive, transport and machine-to-machine markets. We're delighted to have joined forces with MicroDoc to offer a shrinkwrap solution to these markets, and we look forward to continuing to enhance the JSR82 offering with richer APIs to reduce development time and enable the full power of Bluetooth to be harnessed in a variety of scenarios".
Rococo (www.rococosoft.com) was one of the original members of the JSR82 Expert Group, which defined JSR82, and has shipped its JSR82 implementation on over a hundred million mobile phones to date. Rococo also offers development tools to enable rapid the creation of Bluetooth applications in Java.
MicroDoc is a leading ISV, systems integrator and long term IBM partner located in Germany. Founded in 1991, MicroDoc has specialized in object oriented software technologies and provides software and services to a variety of markets. MicroDoc was the first European business partner for IBM’s embedded Java platform and offers customizing, platform ports, distribution and licensing for the IBM embedded product range. MicroDoc supports a variety of Open Source software products (in particular Linux) and is an active member of the Eclipse Foundation.
Contact:
Volker Höfer
vho@microdoc.com
+49-89-551 9690
Adrienne Wolfe
awolfe@rococosoft.com
+353 1 4877617
A critique of the JawBone
Well, I have to say, we tried a couple of the JawBone Headsets, and we did not have an experience that matched their killer video for the product:
http://us.jawbone.com/demo.aspx
So I was interested to see this review of the JawBone from GuideWire:
http://guidewiregroup.wordpress.com/2008/10/15/i-cant-hear-you-ive-got-a-jawbone-in-my-ear/
Man - was he not impressed! I'm wondering if anyone else had similar experiences? Interesting also that he switched to a GigaAnt (tried them, like them). He had come from a Plantronics, and they're noted for their high audio quality.
We'll give the JawBone another whirl and report back.
Teaser: JSR82, Android and Impronto
We've been doing some work with Android, which you'll have spotted does not currently have JSR82 support. If anyone is interested in getting a very very very early release of some internal stuff we've done to offer JSR82 support in the Simulator with Android, drop an email to us a sos "at" rococosoft "dot" com.
Dr. Scott Dick - University Of Alberta
From time to time we cover "cool" Bluetooth-related projects here and we interview the people involved.
This is a little different. Dr. Scott Dick is a Faculty Member and Lecturer at the University of Alberta. He specializes in computational intelligence (fuzzy logic, neural networks), machine learning and data mining, with applications in software reliability and livestock disease monitoring. He's been lecturing in Software Engineering since since 2003; he introduced mobile-computing platforms in 2004.
He's using Impronto in his courses. You may be aware that we offer our tools for free to Universities and have done for several years now.
I asked him "what's he doing with Impronto - and what's the context". I thought it might be useful to share that with you. Here's what he wrote:
I am a faculty member in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Alberta, teaching in the Software Option of the Computer Engineering program. I am using the Impronto development kit in a "capstone" software engineering design course, for senior students in the last semester of their degree programs. The purpose of a capstone design course is to provide students with a hands-on opportunity to design a relatively large product in a group setting, thus allowing them to demonstrate how they can apply all the knowledge and skills they have acquired in the course of their education. The outcome of this course is the completion of a reasonably "large" system -- one that could not possibly have been built by a single student in the time available. Capstone courses are often regarded by employers as a revealing test of the students' ability to work in a team and complete a complex project.
Some years ago, I realized that basing all of the capstone projects on desktop platforms was a disservice to the students. Modern software development was increasingly oriented towards mobile platforms and wireless networks, and indeed most of the really creative and interesting products were now being targeted at mobile devices rather than desk-bound PCs. There is also a trend towards multi-platform computing, where functionality in a system is partitioned between high-powered desktops and less-powerful mobile devices.
I thus began looking for technologies and development platforms that would allow the students to create desktop systems, mobile systems, or heterogeneous systems for their capstone projects. We selected Impronto as part of the mobile-computing infrastructure because it is an easy-to-use JSR82 implementation (the students have already had several courses with programming assignments in Java) that is easy to install and maintain on Linux systems. We use Bluetooth networks because of their limited range (10 meters); switching between base stations is an important part of true wireless networks, but an 802.11 network's range (100 meters) would cover the entire building with a single access point. We have Bluetooth radio antennas for the desktops (USB dongles), and Bluetooth-equipped PDAs (with development kits) as the remainder of the infrastructure for the course. We are also currently acquiring a set of Tablet PCs, which are another point in the spectrum of mobile devices.
Students generally have a great deal of freedom in selecting the projects they will work on; I believe (and experience confirms) that one of the important determinants of success in a capstone project is for the students to choose projects that they feel passionate about. I do not, for instance, require that any of the projects incorporate mobile computing (although there is a set of three laboratory exercises to familiarize the students with the mobile computing infrastructure). In the past four years, just under half of the student groups have elected to tackle mobile-computing projects
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So there you go. We're aware of quite a few other Universities and Research Labs using Impronto in different ways. If you're interested in sharing your work and your experiences, drop us a line.