When I last covered the bluetooth story of IPL’s Royal Challenger team, few things came out clearly:
- People are ready to try out bluetooth (unlike the regular belief and concerns regd. virus/spam etc)
- BlueRevolution is happening and advertisers are looking for newer channels to market product
And that means a local search player can partner with bluetooth marketing company and can easily send local data/ads to users. In India, most of the bluetooth advertising will happen via youth joints like Cafe Coffee day, Barista and it’s just a matter of time that local players will start distributing very relevant info/discount coupons to users.
Infact, I’d say that local search/info + bluetooth is lot more powerful than a approximated location based service.
What’s your take?
i guess we’d need more telibrahmas to create more ‘bluefi’ zones first?
meanwhile, just for academic interest, how precise can geo tagging get? can say, two adjacent shops in a mall have distinctive ‘coordinates’?
Not sure. There are two things that I find a problem with:
1. need to install extra hardware all over the country … while towers are already there
2. asking people to switch bluetooth on. I keep my bluetooth off by default, because of virus/spam/power-consumption
would like to know other’s opinions about this.
This may sound a little Bozoish but IMHO, Bluetooth increases number of stakeholders in the already complicated Mobile ecosystem which am not sure is in the best interest of either consumer or content provider.
Also, I personally never accept any anonymous messages over bluetooth reason, stories abt people receiving viruses over BT.
But Bluetooth is a very interesting medium for viral content which users want to share p2p and am not sure it has been exploited enough in that respect, what do you think?
@manuscrypts: the real answer is that geo-tagging in india still isn’t that perfect where two businesses in same localities cannot be that accurate. Infact, for all practical purpose you may not even need that.
Right now, the basic challenge is to
a. index all the businesses
b. index localities (with geotags).
@Kpower, @lalit – you guys are geeks -maynot be the right target segment
I think its not going to work. Why would someone keep their bluetooth enabled all the time. If they do it now, its probably because they are not being spammed. Once spamming starts (delivery of unwanted ads), they will be more aware and would start turning it off. Popularity of devices that enables users to skip ads show that users don’t like “unwanted” ads. Maybe some don’t mind but I am sure that number would be small.
- Shailender
I think it should get interesting with more blufi zones. I did experience the same in IPL matches and the did a great work in terms of educating. Banners, Big screen reinforced what we would receive.
All together it was a great execution I though.
Company to watchout for