Rococo

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.

Posted by Sean at 02:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

------------------------------------------------------

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

Posted by Sean at 02:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Sean at 04:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We've been busy at Rococo with a few new projects, some of which are finally beginning to see the light of day. For those of you asking about a Simulator that works with Android - you'll have to wait another few weeks :-(

However, we've been doing some work on both Windows (XP, Vista) and Windows Mobile. Today we're releasing a 1.0 version of our Impronto DevKit for Windows XP and Vista. As you may know, in the past, we've been grumbling about the missing APIs for L2CAP in the Microsoft Bluetooth Stack. Well, we're still grumbling, but we decided to go ahead and release Impronto, without L2CAP, for WIndows XP and Vista. It passes the JSR82 TCK, apart from the L2CAP elements. All feedback is most welcome! And as usual, the tools are offered free for non-commercial use.

You can request the new version at the Rococo website, here:

http://www.rococosoft.com/registration_impronto.asp

Release notes are here:

http://www.rococosoft.com/DevKitWindowsRelNotes1_0.html

We'll shortly release Impronto for WIndows Mobile also, which *does* have full L2CAP support. This required creating an extension layer for L2CAP in order to provide the full JSR82 functionality and pass the full TCK.

More to follow as we get our new work out the door!

Posted by Sean at 06:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was at a Mobile Web 2.0 Summit recently in London. Part of the conference had a "pitch" session for startups. Each company had 10 minutes to pitch their wares to the attendees, who included VCs, Telecom Executives, Press and assorted bloggers and industry people. Dial2Do even pitched (and sang)! But that's another story...

One of the companies that pitched was called aka-aki, from Germany. They are a very interesting startup that mashes up Bluetooth, Social Networking and some other concepts into an innovative service. I asked them if they would consider doing an interview for our blog, and they kindly agreed. This area, which I'll choose to call:

proximity-and-location-based-social-networking

is heating up now, with Imity being acquired by Zyb recently, and with a few other players having emerged in the last 6-12 months. So - without further ado.......

1. Give us a brief background on the company. How did it come about - what was the inspiration? How many people are there now, and where are you based?

aka-aki evolved from the diploma project of 5 of the 8 founders at the Berlin University of the Arts in 2007. The inspiration was to bring about all the functions known from social networking on the internet to the streets. Because real life is still not happening in front of a computer. It happens on trains, in universities, in bars and clubs and airport waiting areas. So clicking people would be very useful here in real life on the streets. So we had this vision and found technologies that everyone carries in their pocket (bluetooth and mobile internet connections) to bring social networking to real life. We created aka-aki, got the best score at university for it and decided to found a company that goes on developing aka-aki and brings it to the market. Now, in summer 2008, aka-aki is a Berlin based startup with 14 people working in the office.

2. Tell us a little bit about yourselves. What's your background? What are you working on in general?

Most of the founders of aka-aki have a marketing background - they studied advertising and strategic communications. With this background they know about the important challenges for any mobile application in a still-developing market. but they also know how to face them and are now working full time in their company to make aka-aki what is called a killerapp. Of course this happens hand in hand with the IT specialist co-founders and software developers! But the fact that the founders do not come exclusively from the IT field, brings a special extremely user-focused way of thinking to the company. A lot of other companies seem to have a great technology first and then hire some marketing people to find something it could be used for. We do it the other way around.

3. Give us the elevator pitch on Aka-aki? Who's it for? What does it (basically) do? We'll go in to more detail on key features later on...

Aka-aki can be used both with a PC via the community website and a Java application on the cellphone. It offers three main features:

1. It lets you click people in reality: When someone interesting is around, the cell phone instantly shows you a photo, common interests, mutual friends and much more.

2. aka-aki automatically writes your personal diary of encounters: it saves all your encounters for future reference on the aka- aki website, so you can even make new contacts later on. It could be the end of the business card and the second chance for missed connections.

3. It lets you carry your friends in your pocket: aka-aki helps you to keep in touch with your friends on the go: text messages can be exchanged, no matter whether from the website to the mobile, from the mobile to the web or whatever. and using microblogging you can show your friends what you are up to right now and see what they are doing.

All in all it is fun on the go. And it is the first mobile community with elk. Yes, elk.

4. How long have you been working on aka-aki?

The diploma project started in fall 2006. Software development started in spring 2007. After having founded the company in summer, we started a closed beta test in late summer 2007 and opened the service to the public on April 3rd 2008.

5. What stage is it at now?

Well, right now it is still in beta. And developing. We research how the users use it, what they think and do with the features we offer them. This is a process that will not stop. As long aka-aki is used by people it will continue to change. Since the public launch we have almost 5000 people signed up and using it as of June 2008. We still consider it to be at a very early stage. And of course, there is much more to come.

6. What's it built or written in? What platforms does it support? What influenced the tools or languages you chose to write the software in?

For now the mobile interface is a Java app for mobile phones. That decision was made very early, because at the moment this is the only platform that is supported by a very large number of phones. Apps for iPhone, Blackberry and WindowsMobile will follow.

We started with Java because it is supported by the largest number of devices. We always knew that the biggest challenge for aka-aki would be to gain a critical mass of users. So we chose to make technical barriers as low as possible. That is also the reason why we chose bluetooth and not GPS.

7. Were there particular technical limitations of Bluetooth, or Java, or JSR82 or other technology that you had to address? If so - give us a little bit of background on that?

No. Even JSR82 seems to be quite widespread today. Bluetooth is limited to about 20 meters, but that is no problem for our approach of telling something about the people that are really THERE. If my GPS tells me something about somebody around the next block and whom I cannot see... well, I probably would not talk to him anyway.

But aka-aki is always open for including other technologies when they become widespread enough and if they enable new interesting features that make the user experience better.

Of course porting is always a problem that needs a lot of time and man power. But we give our best. And we also handle this by having a basic version of the service that can be used without the mobile app. That is what our pending patent is about.

8. You have a patent pending in an area that sounds pretty cool - can you elaborate on that a bit and explain it?

The patent pending technology allows us to log encounters between mobile devices without the need for software being installed on those devices. So we can include information on who met whom when into social community networks. Using this we can make the technical barriers for potential users even lower.

9. What was the biggest problem or roadblock you had to deal with in the project so far? Technology? Money? People? Location?

Well, we had no real road blocks to date. We always faced the problems when they appeared and solved them or adapted strategy.

One of the biggest problems for us are the costs for mobile data services in Germany. But this is changing right now. Though slowly.

And, as everywhere in the European IT industry, finding J2ME developers is a challenge. So, if anyone looks for a job in rocking Berlin... call us!

10. What's next? What do you hope to work on over the next 12 months?

One next big thing will be the launch of the english version to make aka-aki available for international users. Further there will be versions for other platforms.

11. Anything else I should have asked you? Anything else you'd like to say?

Sign-up! www.aka-aki.com

And finally of course, there's the mystery of the elk :-)

Posted by Sean at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I promise to try this one out and report back.

MapMyTracks uses a java Applet to track and record your position using either built-in GPS (if the device has it) or an external GPS unit via Bluetooth. It uses JSR82 in the latter case.

Specifically targeted at Sports scenarios - track your run, cycle, sail, etc. Site looks half-decent - but the devil's in the detail. I'll see if it works with my Sony Ericsson and an external Bluetooth GPS and report back.

Posted by Sean at 03:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We're fans here of Salling, especially their Clicker application.

So we just came across BlueShareWare.com, who do something similar to Salling (Bluetooth Remote control for Mac or PC), plus something different:

- Outlook Dialler (lets you dial someone on your phone directly from within Outlook over Bluetooth)
- LockItNow (uses your mobile as a security token to lock or unlock your PC)
- BeamItNow (auto send photos from mobile to PC)

Nice set of applications. Must ask them if they're using JSR82 (and if not, why not!!! :-)

Posted by Sean at 02:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Another cool project using JSR82. In fact, in this case, it's a little different, as there are really two projects worth looking at here (BlueCove and MicroEmulator ). We're going to concentrate on BlueCove. Vlad Skarzhevskyy is currently the point-person for this project, which is an open-source implementation of Java APIs for Bluetooth. It's not, officially, JSR82 compliant (yet), as they'll explain themselves, and it's mainly been focused on the desktop / PC arena (as opposed to say, the embedded/mobile area).

As you can see, they've had fun and games with different Bluetooth Stacks, and certain bits of Bluetooth hardware on Windows. We share their pain :-)

As an aside, at Rococo we've looked at the MicroEmulator and think it's great, and we plan to offer an option for our Impronto Simulator users to be able to use MicroEmulator out of the box.

Anyway - over to the BlueCove Team!


1. Give us a brief description of the project. How did it come about - what was the inspiration?

Blue Cove is a Java SE library for Bluetooth. It has JSR-82 interfaces. Blue Cove library is not referred to as an implementation of JSR-82, as it doesn't pass all the JSR-82 TCK tests at this time (but we are really close). The Blue Cove Library is licensed under LGPL so it is possible to link and distribute commercial software with it.

As for the background to it, James Scott, one of the original founders, writes:

Blue Cove was created in 2004 by myself and others who were working at the time at Intel Research Cambridge, a small research lab. We wanted to use Bluetooth in Java under WinXP and WinCE, but no JSR-82 implementation existed allowing J2ME's Bluetooth calls to operate in that environment. Blue Cove was built to support a broader piece of research named Haggle, which is still alive and well (its now a European funded project, and has source code on Sourceforge as well as a webpage at http://www.haggleproject.org/ ). Eben Upton was the lead developer on Blue Cove as he was doing an internship at Intel Research during his PhD. I was supervising the project along with Christophe Diot.

Blue Cove was given its own existence since it was clearly useful to others outside the Haggle effort, and the Intel lab's policy was to publish open source code wherever possible. It proved popular, though unfortunately we had little time to support it ourselves. Ben Hui maintained a website (see benhui.net ) which had a great "howto" about using Blue Cove. Denis Labaye eventually picked up Blue Cove in May 2005 when it was dormant, and asked if he could take it over. And that's where I lose track.

I'm really happy to see continued progress in Blue Cove.

Then the project was maintained by Paul Tötterman and he moved it to Google Code.

I joined the project in 2007 because I wanted to be able to compile and tests J2ME application using real Bluetooth connections. So the best option was to join the project and fix all the bugs. I started from creating test application to ensure interoperability with other JSR-82 implementations. Also now I'm using JSR-82 TCK tests to ensure quality of the product. In spring there was an attempt to make OS X port by Eric Wagner. In May 2007 I fixed all the bugs I was aware of and started adding ability to extend Blue Cove with support for additional Bluetooth stacks on Windows and Linux. Now Broadcom WIDCOMM stack is complete.

Also I decided to support the BlueSoleil Stack. There is ~5% (maybe more?) market coverage for this stack, and since devices for this Stack are really cheap, this attracted attentions of many students to Blue Cove project. In spite of the fact that only limited functionality is available on this stack, support for it got users attention.

I graduated Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1993, M. Sc. in Applied Mathematics and Physics. Used to work DIGITAL Equipment Corporation (DEC) now I work for big corporate a provider of software and services for billing, CRM and OSS systems.

I have some Open Source development experience.
Historical: mp3bookhelper, Mp3 management tools http://mp3bookhelper.sourceforge.net/
Project completed in 2004, More than 40,000 download, 3 years since last release and still no serious defects found in application.

Now I 'm helping Bartek Teodorczyk with MicroEmulator. MicroEmulator is a pure Java implementation of J2ME in J2SE. http://www.microemu.org/. I joined project in 2006. Since then we created professionally looking website and changed the image of application.

From my point of view the MicroEmulator is an alternative to Sun's WTK. Together with another pet project (http://pyx4me.com/) collection of tools we are using to simplify J2ME build process in maven 2. This is all I need for j2me application development.

It was my desire to have JSR-82 integrated in MicroEmulator thst originally brought me to Blue Cove project.

Since January I have been working on the project three evenings in a week. This comes to approximately 500 hours, may be more. My experience with JSR-82 is dated back to 2005.

The latest release 2.0.0 is really stable and all major functionality is working. The next version 2.0.1 will be very stable and mature. And all implemented functionality will conform to JSR-82 and pass the JSR-82 TCK tests. Anything that does not conform to the standard will be documented.

Actually I already answered this while talking about MicroEmulator and James described the root cause. I can also put a different angle here.

I used Blue Cove for prototyping new J2ME application and found the quality of the product is not acceptable. So I bought avetanaBluetooth and was happy with it for some time until I run out of licenses and found some problems in the product that I can't fix. Also as an example, I created very simple obex-maven-plugin to install J2ME MIDlet application on OBEX Bluetooth-enabled phone via OBEX Object Push. This improved my compile/deploy cycle from 3 minutes to 30 seconds. I wanted to share this plugin....

The major reason for Blue Cove is to offer an open-sourced version. The benefit of having Open Source implementation in repository is outstanding.

Stability of Microsoft Bluetooth Stack. It took me weeks of running long-running continuous tests until I found that the problem can be solved simply by using different Bluetooth USB dongle D-Link DBT-120 instead of Microsoft Wireless Transceiver for Bluetooth 2.0.

Also I spend two weekends figuring out how to properly integrate with the Broadcom stack. Application was crashing, JVM crashing, I was ready to give-up. By the end solution was very simple: compile switch for C++. I had nobody to ask and nobody to help. If I would have minimum support from Broadcom I would have spent much less time.

I expect to create stable java library that can be used on 99% of Bluetooth enabled desktops. Even if it can't be certified by Motorola and can't be legally called "JSR-82 implementation" it will help to create Java desktop applications that need Bluetooth connections. For example, Medical applications, Monitoring and Connectivity applications.

Also I expect that students are starting to learn JSR-82 using Blue Cove. I'm answering all the question I'm receiving by e-mail no matter how simple they are.

Another hope I have is that if I achieve quality and acceptance of the product this all will improve JSR-82 implementations on Mobile devices.

Next would be OBEX, Linux BlueZ and Windows TOSHIBA stack. This way we can cover all JSR-82 PC market :) Also I have an idea of adding JSR-82 emulator so J2ME application communications can be automatically tested and demonstrated on the website together with MicroEmulator.

For now I'm the only one active on the project so it may take some time. But you see how many hand this project had changed.... Hope one day I will receive a letter form a professional like me saying "I'd like to join and I have 5 hours a week to spend on Open Source development".

Recently I contacted big corporation and there was a time when they agreed to help me with Blue Cove, but by the end I still with no support. They just need to give a little more hope into open source and Corporate and Open worlds can mutually beneficially coexist.

Personally I hope not to give up on the project even when Motorola realises JSR-82 RI under the Apache License. I'm committed to quality. I may be busy doing other interesting work but I will keep Blue Cove quality in my hands.

I would like to thank Motorola for making an efforts to move to open source. Hope that some time in a future my employer also will be joining Open Source movement. I think that future is in the professional Open source.

Ask me what is my dream? One day I come to work and my Manager say: "From now on you should spend 5 hours of you working week on any open source project of your choice".

Posted by Sean at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Ladeeees and genellmen, Impronto Simulator version 1.3 is now available! That's right, the world's first-and-still-best (IMHO) JSR82 Simulator has been updated, polished and primped, and is available for your consideration.

Rather than bore you with the details, let me say this: as usual, we continue provide the Simulator free for non-commercial use (hobbyists, academics, geeks!). Details on applying for it are here.

Stay tuned for more product news and the next in our series of cool JSR82 projects!

Posted by Sean at 05:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)