The New Buzz In Mobile Marketing May 20, 2009
bluBuzz - Reaching Your Customers Through Bluetooth Technology
I wanted to alert my readers to a new form of technology developed by one of my former colleagues that just hit the market and could be a boon to small businesses - especially restaurants, bars, and specialty shops. It’s called bluBuzz (www.blubuzz.net).
The general principle is this…. It’s a device and app that contacts Bluetooth devices within range - like a pedestrian walking in front of your store, bar, restaurant or shop - and sends them an ad or coupon and they have the choice to accept it. It’s location-specific so it’s only contacting the potential customers in your general vicinity and they in turn then can come in and redeem the drink coupon or whatever special they just received on their mobile device.
The following information, for the most part, comes from a site with review/product release info on bluBuzz…
bluBuzz is a commerce-based networking solution that allows subscribers to send various forms of content (text, images, audio and video) containing menus, drink specials, sale discounts, etc. to consumers’ mobile devices via Bluetooth. Using a combination of custom hardware and software, bluBuzz provides an open mobile commerce platform for proximity-based marketing, purchases, gaming, civil alerts and in-network communications (text and voice chat), all via Bluetooth.
bluBuzz’s initial target markets are real estate, sporting events and the food and beverage (restaurants, nightclubs and chains) verticals. By partnering with other entities that operate in these verticals, they are projecting a minimum install base of 20,000 access point locations and three million clients globally by the end of 2009.
Location-aware apps are hot topics for 2009 and bluBuzz takes an approach we haven’t seen before. By utilizing Bluetooth functionality on mobile phones, rather than GPS, users receive alerts (separate from SMS) from businesses in their direct vicinity. Control on the consumer side ensures a low level of disturbance and a hardware access point at the business provides more bandwidth for richer content. There’s a lot of potential in the bluBuzz approach. It will be interesting to see where businesses, and their target customers, take the technology.
