Why Bluetooth ®?

Bluetooth® Proximity Marketing provides exciting opportunities allowing you to broadcast rich content such as images, audio, video and applications to nearby mobile devices.

This powerful marketing technology is particularly effective for targeting attendees at live events, retail outlets and exhibitions. The result is increased footfall to your store, more visitors to your exhibition stand, higher awareness of your brand and participation in other mobile services.

Bluetooth® is currently the world's best supported short-range wireless standard and recent campaigns have shown that more than 50% of people have their Bluetooth® switched on, or will do so when prompted. For highly targeted campaigns, response rates of more than 70% can be achieved.

Using Bluetooth®, you are able to target an audience with near-pinpoint accuracy, based on location, and the cost of running Bluetooth campaigns is more predictable and more often cheaper than other forms of promotional  campaigns.

Bluetooth® marketing is not just about pushing out adverts - we have fully integrated Bluetooth®, Internet and Messaging solutions that communicate at real-time with back-end systems and the mobile networks for a rich interactive experience with the consumer, based on demographic, time-of-day and location.

How is Bluetooth developing?

Bluetooth is developing further in two different directions, the first, known as High Speed Bluetooth, being the higher-bandwidth but lower-power-per-bit Bluetooth over UWB or Bluetooth over 802.11. Even if the BT SIG announced in March 2006 that the UWB technology will be used for the high speed channel, the Bluetooth SIG just unveiled that 802.11 will be given higher priority, UWB being used in a second.

High Speed Bluetooth enables a new range of applications such as storage, high-speed file transfer, printing, synchronization, fast music/video download and streaming. At first sight, none of these applications – which are all, in theory, very simple data transfer tasks – requires Bluetooth. They could be handled by other wireless technologies such as WiFi, or Certified Wireless USB (which is also based on UWB).

However, as these tasks are quite different to each other, Bluetooth offers an ideal means of combining them in a single, unified and problem-free way. By porting Bluetooth on top of UWB or 802.11, most of the anticipated uses of all the existing Bluetooth profiles are covered. At the same time, Bluetooth provides a framework that allows other uses, such as multimedia, to be created in a non-proprietary fashion, thanks to the definition of new profiles. In addition, Bluetooth handles the security and device registration issues thanks to the Secured Simple Pairing feature added in the newly released Bluetooth 2.1+EDR specifications. Furthermore, the power consumption is more fully optimized in High Speed Bluetooth than in Certified Wireless USB or WiFi, through the use of the legacy Bluetooth part for control signaling and low power modes. Bluetooth therefore allows for a swifter and more reliable implementation than would be possible using other wireless standards.

Initial pilot High Speed Bluetooth implementations can be expected during 2008 and, assuming take up rates similar to previous versions of the Bluetooth standard, widespread adoption in consumer products can be expected in 2010/2011. Because of its large bandwidth, Bluetooth over UWB is likely to be a critical part of future home entertainment and home networking systems. The bandwidth will permit, for example, the driving of high definition video / TV streams from handsets, as well as the ability to support data-intensive jobs such as computer backup and file sharing. For single wireless technology companies, such as Wireless USB chipset vendors and WLAN chipset vendors, High Speed Bluetooth is highly attractive.

These vendors may expect to leverage High Speed Bluetooth as a way to enter the huge Bluetooth market by providing higher bandwidth alternatives to traditional Bluetooth applications. Moreover, these vendors are able to concentrate on their core expertise in UWB or WLAN, while integrating third party Bluetooth IP without diverting too many resources

The second direction that Bluetooth development is taking is the extremely low power, low data rate market. “Wibree”, a standard initially developed by Nokia and later adopted by the BT SIG as Ultra Low Power (ULP) Bluetooth, is designed to permit the interoperability of devices such as wireless keyboards, mice, remote controllers, wireless sensors, remote displays and medical devices. In dual-mode implementation devices such as cellphones or laptops, ULP Bluetooth has the benefit that it can reuse most of the existing Bluetooth functionality, incurring only minimal cost increase.

Let us help you take advantage of what is the biggest growth area in low energy transmission marketing....