Bluetooth enabled billboards

As people walk past the posters they receive a message on their phone asking

them if they wish to accept the advert. If they do, they can receive movies,

animations, music or still images further promoting the advertised product.

“It's all about delivering high quality content, tailored for mobile

usage,” says Alasdair Scott, co-founder and chief creative officer of

London-based Filter UK, who created the system, called BlueCasting.

Working with advertising company Maiden Group, also in London, trials of the

system were recently held at six London railway stations. Poster locations for

rock band Coldplay's new album offered to beam further promotional material,

including song clips from the album, to the phones of passers-by. Take a look at

the kind of content used, here

(QuickTime format).

The posters detected 87,000 Bluetooth phones over a two week period, of which

about 17% were willing to download the clip, says Scott.

Proximity-based broadcasting

The system works by having a large directional Bluetooth transmitter behind

the billboard that searches the region up to 100 metres in front of the advert

for any phones with their Bluetooth function turned on.

This way you can make sure that only people who can see the billboard are

offered the additional promotion, says Simon O'Regan, Filter UK's Technical

Officer. “It's inherently proximity-based broadcasting,” he says.

Furthermore, there is no risk of downloading viruses or other malware to the

phone, says O'Regan: “We don't send applications or executable code.”

The system uses the phone's native download interface so they should be able

to see the kind of file they are downloading before accepting it, he adds.

Ollie Whitehouse, a Bluetooth computer security expert at Symantec, in

Dublin, Ireland agrees: “On the whole there should be no risk to users at

all.”

But that does not mean that all non-executable files are safe, notes

Whitehouse. Files formatted to look like jpeg picture files have been created in

the past that exploit inherent vulnerabilities in particular hardware, causing

it to crash, he says.

Active consumption

A bigger question in all likelihood is how the companies will persuade users

to accept the adverts once the novelty has worn off. “If we can provide

exclusive or valuable content to consumers, they'll actively want to consume

it,” says Scott. Unlike spam, these promotions will have something to offer,

he claims, such as content or vouchers.

Elsewhere, other software companies, such as ScanBuy in New York and Semacode

in Ontario, have been experimenting with making posters interactive by having 3D

barcodes printed on them.

Their software allows a phone camera to scan the code and launch the

phone's browser at a particular e-commerce site — to buy concert tickets,

for example. But with BlueCasting, downloading is a lot faster and, importantly,

free, because it uses the Bluetooth connection and not the cellphone network.

If BlueCasting still sounds too intrusive, there is always one solution, says

Whitehouse: “Just make sure your Bluetooth device is set so that it's not

discoverable to other devices.”

Source: Newscientist