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Advertising Via GPS
tebubaga writes: "Now that jamming has been turned off and GPS has gotten that much more accurate, CNN posted this story describing how advertisers are drooling over the ability to deliver ads in real time to your cell phone, pager or PDA based on your location as reported by GPS."
The device could track your location throughout the day, then upload that in a single burst. In a single burst, the device could be sent an archive of ads, one of which is displayed when the device detects itself in a specific location. Memory is cheaper than data transfer in this situation, I would speculate.
-------
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
Constantly broadcasting your location is a serious invasion of your privacy. Even people who don't pay attention to privacy issues now will probably pay attention to this.
Theoretically it wouldn't be much of a privacy issue of only the wireless service provider knew your location. As a matter of fact, by using some sophisticated triangulation algorithms, they track your cell phone to a few hundred feet now, without GPS.
The problem with that is that there'll probably only going to be a few large advertising firms (like DoubleClick for the Internet now) and so they'll get a pretty good idea of where you go, even if there are some gaps in the record. They'd be able to learn quite a bit about you: where you shop, who your friends are, where you work, etc.
Not that some multi-national corporations can't learn that kind of stuff about me now. However, it'd be a lot harder to piece together information of disparate types. Consistent location information would be much more useful.
Bah. I spend most of my time at work or at home. I have plenty of computing and communication power at both locations. Maybe I should give up all my mobile devices, or at least the ones that can transmit something. At least at home I'm behind a firewall, to restrict the information I reveal to the Internet. Will I need firewall software for my mobile phone too?
James
GPS is receive only. Yes, your cell phone could have an integrated GPS receiver, and then use the phone portion to transmit your location, but I don't think that's going to happen.
Here's why:
- The telcos still control the cell-towers. So it's gonna cost advertisers plenty of money to have cell phones that are broadcasting your whereabouts all the time, and sending down those adds. I bet the per-view cost of this type of advertising would be prohibitive for most advertisers.
- Battery power. GPS takes 10-30 seconds to lock up satellites, and it needs to be left turned on to hold a lock, so it would be activated quite a lot of the time. That adds battery drain to the cell phone, which is exactly what nobody wants
- GPS is Line-of-Sight. This isn't going to work in office buildings, shopping malls, subways, or even cars. So when exactly are they gonna target you for adds? During the 1.5 minutes it takes to walk from the parking lot to the mall entrance? GPS also performs poorly in major downtown cores, because of "Urban Valley" effect, which blocks satellites that are anything except directly overhead.
- Cost. GPS circuitry is getting cheaper all the time, but even a low-end consumer unit adds more cost to a phone than people are going to be willing to pay for.
Hello, Mr. Smith? I'm Officer Martin with the police department. Phone company records show that you were in the area when a car was broken into in the 2400 block of main street about 10 pm. Could we ask what was your business in the area at the time? Were you aware that this area is notorious for drug trafficing? As we have probable cause due to your proximity, would you mind furnishing us with your fingerprints and a urine sample? By the way, the owner of the car is planning to sue the business where the car was parked, and her attorney has issued a subpoena for these records. We'll naturally be turning them over. No doubt you'll be called as a witness. If they find out you were there and didn't inform the police, you'll probably also be the next defendant. Have a nice day.
GPS signals can still be regionally jammed by the government, for national security concerns.
What these telemarketers are drooling over is the ability to acurately track cell phone users. And the technology is improving to do this.
Disclaimer (standard for me). It is late, and I need to get to bed.
The problem with your plan is what happens when I've got a bunch of stores in a row all broadcasting their ads. Do I get the equivilent of spam on my cell or PDA with all their ads that I then have to sift through? People already drive like shit just dialing phone numbers on their cell phones. I wouldn't want to be on the road whilst they were scrolling through their cell spam reading the ad on their 3 or 4 line display.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
What does removing jamming have to do with it, surly GPS was acurate enough to send close-to-pin point ad's anyway?
Whats wrong with billboards and bus stops anyway?
Syllable : It's an Operating System
So does this mean when I'm walking in certain parts of town I'll now get XXX ads from the nearest prostitute? Loooovvvvely.
The next site to slashdot will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and start slashdotting it early!
...Force people to give all their money to corporations, and eliminate all this huhu about marketing and products.
Get rid of the middle men that are advertising and the actual product. Things would be much more effecient that way...
Oh wait! That would be Human Slavery Controlled by Corporations!
Guess we will have to keep the marketing/consumables buffer in place to retain the illusion of a Democractic Republic and Freedom.
Why must everything always be so complex; Guess it is true, TANSTAAFL.
--NightHawk
Tyranny = Government choosing how much power to give the people.
___
Go near a Frye's and you get an advertisement for COMPUSA. Many even a 10 minute special.
Head towards a McDonalds, get an ad beamed to you that gives you $1 off your next purchase at Wendy's, good for 20 minutes.
Fight Spammers!
this is mostly from memory, maybe someone can follow with numbers..
:) Mine gets at best 4 meters epe (estimated position error). Unless you'ce got a high grade reciever, you're not gonna get much better. 4 meters is a big swerve. :)
1) accuracy depends on signal strength, how many satatlites you're tracking, and their relative position to each other. 5 sats in a triangle type formation will give you more precision than say, 6 in a near straight line across the sky. There's also a ionsphere induced error, which can be corrected but is normaly not on lower cost commercial units like mine. Avaition units can correct for that error, or military units can use a seperate encryped signal to correct.
2) On a descent recivier, (ie it can hold good sat signal strength while in motion) speed doesn't make much difference. Unless you go faster than 250mph, iirc, where civilian units shot down.
3) I'd not try to drive down the road with most gps systems.
David
bash: ispell: command not found
This sig left intentionally blank.
No, it just means that now they appear in an HUD on your personal VR goggles, superimposed over your normal visual field.
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
How can your PDA be used for an advertisement?
Easy, wonderful Bluetooth technology that lets all you common electronic communicate effortlessly and wirelessly, can easily be able to get information back and forth. I guess they take it that everything you own is bluetoothed, allowing the advertisers to locate your pda (be able to find it via your cell phones IP, and cross reference that with your gps, or just have your GPS report the cell phone's ID) and have it so all banner ads or whatever that are to load on your PDA, whatever advertisements, be set to your location.
Now the nice thing out of this is that if Fryes and Compusa had a "Get their sale at any cost" behavior. Just walk back and forth between the two locations. As you approach the fryes, compusa gives you a $50 rebate on all items, hed towards compusa, and fryes would give you a $100 rebate on anything in the store. Walk back to fryes, get $150 off at compusa, walk to compusa get $200 off at fryes. Do this for a day, buy a few grand worth of equipment, sell it. Along with that buy a PowerBook G3 with airport, and a nice VAIO with a wavelan card, and have them connect to each other. In the end you get some nice machines, a good wad of money, mabye 2-3 hours fo physical activity, and your PDA shuts up cause wavelan network signals interfere with bluetooth to the extent of making it useless.
-Pfhor
"Hey it could happen"
This post sponsored by Http://www.Zarquon-Industries.com
For No Other Reason (TM)
Honey, I don't know why the phone keeps inviting me back to the Pussy Cat Palace. And I certainly don't know why we keep getting ads for low airfares to Tijuana.
There's scarier stuff around, though. Under the guise of better 911 support (emergency services calling in the US; most of the world uses 999), the FBI is pushing the FCC to require the next generation of digital cellphone standards to be able to locate you within ~50 meters. (Some cellphone standards can get pretty close to that by triangulating sites through the network; it's interesting if your phone can do it as well, especially if you don't need to buy GPS to do it. And better GPS makes it easier for cell sites to get precise timing and know where they are precisely so they can do this much more accurately, which is especially important for microcells that you might deploy lots of.) They'd really like to be able to ask your phone where it is without notifying you or asking for permission; there are some people in the cellphone standards committees who are quite annoyed about this, and many who don't see what all this privacy fuss is about and of course it makes it easier for 911 to find you if you're hurt. The interesting trick is that if there's a GPS in the phone, they can ask it where you are without having to leave it on full time, though it does take a little while for the GPS to locate satellites, especially simpler sets that don't locate them in parallel.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Think about it... Every time you use your credit card, or ATM card, or "shopper card", the (hypothetical?) central database knows that you were at some fixed location at that time. My debit card bill already gives a pretty good history of my travels. It doesn't tell you everywhere I've been, only the places where my card got swiped... but then, that's really what advertisers are interested in, anyway.
MSK
GPS-pin-pointed ad near Bally's:
GPS-pin-pointed ad near Starbucks:
There's a lot of potential there...-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I can see it now:
...
...
driving in car...
BEEP-BEEP-BEEP: (phone) 32 New Text Messages received... : Make money from home fast...
{vibrate}: (pager) Congratulations! You have been selected to receive a free subscription to..
BEEP-BEEP-BEEP: (phone) Dear Valued pets.com customer, we just noticed that you're near our affiliate store that sells catbox liners...
{vibrate}: (pager) Hi! This is jiffy lube reminding you that you're overdue for you oil change... we're right on the next block.
{vibrate}: (pager) Safeway is your low price headquarters and we have cantaloupe on sale for
BEEP-BEEP-BEEP: (phone) We've lost our lease! Everything must go! Sofas on sale from $999
{vibrate}: Dear Macy*s Valued customer: Don't miss our semi monthly extra 10% off sale! Take the next exit to get to our store.
BEEP-BEEP-BEEP: (phone) \/\/e 0wN J00, B1AtcH!
Yeah, cool. I can't wait. Whoopee.
It happens now, to some degree.
You are paged to call some number, maybe it's flagged urgeant, or some sort. but it's really a scam, or someone making you call to listen to an ad on your nickel, or call extra long distance for a big phone charge.
sounds like it is time to expand the anti-fax advertising law to include pagers, cell phones, and the like.
too bad I can't set up my cell phone to charge the caller for incoming calls, unless I hit a function key or enter a pin on my cell phone.
actually, that sounds like that would be a good idea for another service to offer. I would not mind having it right now. sort of like a 900 option for regular home phones, that you can turn on and off as needed.
certainly within the technology the telcos offer these days....
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Think of the huge marketing databases that are going to be built around this if it ever becomes a reality. They're going to know where you drive everyday, whether or not you are stopping for their ads, what else you bought when you purchased the item advertised (if you use your credit card), where you normally shop, your travel patterns, and a whole pile of other things that we can't even begin to imagine.
Marketing people look for that magic connection called the Beer-Pampers theory. Wal-mart keeps one of the largest marketing databases ever, over 300 terrabytes. They found that customers that buy pampers usually buy beer also, and vice versa. So they put the beer and the pampers in the same aisle and increased their sales on those two products by over 80%. This will be a goldmine for companies like Informix who make one of the best databases for Data Warehousing.
What happens if the government gets ahold of this data, which they will. It'll be like playing SimNation for them. Make some changes in propaganda, or laws, or whatever else and observe the changes. This is pretty scary actually, welcome to the world of the high-tech Gestapo and ultra-effective targeted marketing.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
PIZZA HUT AD ACCIDENTALLY SENT TO CHINESE EMBASSY
Beijing Reportedly "Furious" Over Uninvited Capitalist Intrusion
BELGRADE, SERBIA (AP) - In what the US State Department is calling an "unfortunate mistake", the Belgrade embassy of the People's Republic of China was the target for several Pizza Hut advertisements earlier this evening. Originating from a communications satellite orbiting the Earth at an altitude of several hundred miles, the advertisements had been ordered by Stanley Blyleven, Pizza Hut's vice president of marketing. The messages were received by an on-duty secretary who forwarded them to her immediate supervisor.
"We are so sorry," explained Blyleven. "We thought that we had targeted the Swedish embassy." Blyleven blamed the targeting snafu on "an outdated map that had tomato sauce smeared on it." "It was certainly not our intent to intrude on the Chinese embassy," said Blyleven. "We did not want to intentionally inform the Chinese people about our fresh, plentiful, mouth-watering toppings, our heaping pounds of zesty cheese, or our tantalizing variety of crust styles. It was a mistake; it was simply an honest mistake."
A spokesman for Chinese president Jiang Zemin stated that the incident had "upset him deeply, and could possibly represent a near-irreperable rift in US-Sino relations." State Department spokesman James Rubin had been in contact with a representative of Zemin, but little progress was made in the quest to quell the outrage in Beijing. "The Chinese government views this as a capitalist intrusion into their governmental affairs," reported Rubin. "Although we have explained several times that this was a mistake made by Pizza Hut, we feel that this incident may have been a serious setback."
President Bill Clinton appealed for calm and a mushroom/pepperoni combo with extra cheese.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
(This was on Dave Farber's list.)
..."U.S. patent office has conditionally allowed Cell-Loc to claim the
:-)
If the press release is to be believed, it's a patent on
using a wireless handset to deliver information that's
dependent on where you are, such as telling you the nearest MacDonald's.
- handset-based services granted now, network-based pending.
I'm not sure how broad their patent claims are,
as opposed to their marketing PR (:-), but it sounds like it's
way over-broad, steps on lots of things that should be obvious enough
to anyone skilled in the trade, and sounds like Yet Another
Stupid Patent Office Trick.
Their Press Release www.cell-loc.com
delivery of handset-based wireless location content and services over
the Internet as its property, regardless of technological method employed."
Unfortunately, after downloading the half megabyte of animated Web Designer Candy
that serves as their main web page, it wasn't possible to get to any
real information, but YMMV...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Consider the other possibilities of highly accurate GPS, some of these already in place in various forms.
1. Digital travel guides that automatically load the information for the landmarks near you. You could adjust the scale, so if you're standing at 42nd Street and 7th Avenue in New York you might get entries for the US, New York State, New York City, Manhattan, Times Square, the Zipper, or Achmed's newsstand on the corner.
2. You're an architectural student. You've got video goggles and a strap-on computer (not rod-shaped, people). You walk around the city seeing what is an exact digital representation of what you would ordinarily see, all in 3D, except you can choose to view the steel structure, cut-aways, the 33rd floor, the bedrock, textural details, or even a time-lapse video of the building being constructed. All live, on the fly, on the street. As you walk, the video adjusts. Buildings could be marked with little icons at the entrance to indicate their compatibility with the technology.
3. Big-ass games of blind man's bluff. Cover your eyes with a backwards ski mask. Turn on the speaking function of your GPS device. Have it give you instructions on how to get where you're going.
4. Real-time traffic monitoring: in a dense city, GPS devices could be installed in municipal vehicles. Time and rate of those autos could be reported via other radio link to central computer, redistributed to everyone else's GPS and overlaid on a map telling them where the best routes might be found. Of course, this might turn into infinite game theory iterations.
5. Auto-tuning of radios (kind of like RDS) to your favorite type of preset music choices. GPS devices don't have to be attached to maps and expensive equipment.
6. An excellent source of new stats for golf aficionados: GPS in golf balls. How far off, exactly, was he? This, of course, goes well with my idea for a transparent basketball with a camera and transmitter inside.
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
You left out the best part of the scene...
After you buy your beer, open the can, and head down the road, in the next block you get pulled over, because..........
The ad was paid for by the City and the police were automatically notified when you stopped for a certain period of time to respond to the ad. The city manager has noted a 1000% increase in revenue from fines since the new advertising campaign went into effect.
They can triangulate your cell phone's position from the relative signal strength measured at nearby towers. That's accurate to about a hundred meters. Closer than that, they can simply detect your phone as a radio source.
Remember, your phone transmits periodicly, so the cell system knows what tower you're near, to route incoming calls.
I'm watching the NY-Boston game, here. Who else remembers when the sign behind the plate was "NO PEPPER"? Who actually buys stuff at Modell's just because they saw the sign behind Varitek?
:)
I'm watching the same game (but I'm a Yankees fan who goes to school in Pittsburgh most of the year) and I remember that sign. However, as to your question about advertising...
Most advertising of that nature is just to get name recognition. You might not say "Hey, Modell's! Let's run out to Modell's right now because they bought ad space behind home plate." When you decide to buy a Derek Jeter jersey, though, you might consider going to Modell's because you know that they'll have Yankees jerseys. This is especially true if you're not from New York and don't know where to go to buy sporting goods.
Similarly, companies like General Electric and Siemens buy advertising that doesn't promote any of their products. The idea is to get a company's name out there. Incidentally, for companies like amazon.com and 1-800-FLOWERS (.com) where the name is the means of contact, it's also a way to score some impulse buyers or at least get a few hits/calls to generate interest.
Whoops, the game's back on. Go Yanks!
For more information, click here.
"It's a bit of a marketer's wet dream," says Kyle Shannon, cofounder of Agency.com, an Internet marketing consulting firm.
What a wonderful phrase, just the level of couth and wit I would have expected from an advertiser. I bet he uses phrases like "let's run it up the flagpole and see who salutes" too.
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
But the cost of cel phone service is still expensive enough (especially since some plans also charge your incoming calls as well as outgoing) that if you signed up for service without any mention of ads, would this be comparible to the Unsoliciated FAX law?
I wish there was something that we could do as a nation (or united world) as private citizens to contest the increasing invasive advertizing. Companies think it works, but when you advertize for common necessities, people are going to buy them anyway, and a boycott is probably impossible since the items are required.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
First thing I want to know is how that advertiser got my access into my PDA. Second: Why is that advertiser tracking my movements. Lastly: I want to know how to stop them from doing that.
No, I haven't given in, and I don't like it... but if it turns out that they know exactly who I am and exactly what I've purchased everywhere I've been, and they've figured out already what I need, they might as goddamn well know where to deliver it. I can picture it now: as each of us drives around, we'll be chased by UPS and FedEx trucks.
Maybe the bright side of this is free, add driven cell phone service?
Let's say that we want to find a street corner is Seattle, do we have to wait an extra two minutes while it downloads an animated banner at 9600 bps?
--Nicholas
I can see it now:
"Dear Consumer, according to our GPS data, you've been commuting 1.5 hours every day. ... Enjoy your longtrip home
We have a new house for sale coming up here.
*beep* You're 1 mile from it
*beep* You're 0.5 miles away
*beep* Driving by now, c'mon take a look
*beep* Your loss
Maybe there is a new market in GPS scramblers opening up!
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
Suppose you are going to McDonald's and a 20% discount for the Burger King a block away pops up on your cell phone.
The thing is, advertisers know they're not going to get everyone's business, but they will get some people's attention, and will make some profit. The question is, at what cost...
1: Presumably the whole system only works if there's some standard way for advertisers to query cellphones in a particular area. This would recquire the co-operation of your cellphone provider, and the standard spam-friendly opt-out advertising clauses in your contract.
2: Because it helps them get their message across, which is their job, no matter how loathsome it may seem.
3: Protest loudly, change your provider, don't use GPS apps that report your position to a central server.
If you don't like the idea of people knowing where you are, JUST DON'T USE IT !
That will work as long as you can find a cellphone that doesn't broadcast your position. That also assumes that those that do will make that clear before you buy and sign up.
He started a cell phone provider, and it now has somewhere around 80% market share in Zimbabwe (really, how many cell phone providers can there be?).
And as it was time for presidential elections to be held, guess what started popping up on all of the cell phones? Political messages endorsing the revolutionary candidate. It started as a message from one user to another, and it kept getting passed along until everyone in the country with a cell phone had gotten the message.
The guy who owns the company claims not to have started it, but he certainly didn't do anything to stop it, even if it was taking up his network's bandwidth.
I would post a link, but the WSJ is for-pay-only, sorry.
WHY:From the eshilon style monitoring system on your cell phone (logged to give advertisers better feedback on their adds effectivness)
:-)
Wow - you mean someone will actualy know why I do what I do?
Do you think they would tell me if I asked?
--
So how much will this slow "update" times?
Let's say that we want to find a street corner is Seattle, do we have to wait an extra two minutes while it downloads an animated banner at 9600 bps?
Hey, if you want a nightmare scenario:
May 27, 2002; Monday
Hey Bill!
Late for work again. The traffic lights were jammed.
I'm beginning to agree with your post on Slashdot: let's hire sacrificial hacker felons to take down the WorldWide Advertising Net!
I can usually tolerate the extra ten seconds per intersection as the electronic billboards optimize themselves for the viewing audience, but at rush hour, there's just not enough bandwidth, and the billboard delays throw the entire traffic system out of sync.
We should never have let Time-Warner subsidize our traffic lights. (Good thing my boss never knows when I'm late. His wife made him move to a fancy suburb -- they have Microslack, poor bastards. Now his commute is total obstacle course. They even rig cars to crash for the rubberneck factor. MS doesn't even pretend their crashes are accidental anymore)
Speaking of Microslack crashes, that's why I was late. The Advertising Networks servers went down. I was stuck staring at those damn 'sponsored' BSOD's for over an hour.
(BTW, I have to find a commuter route with a more compatible demographic -- if I have to see another Viagra ad, I'm getting a gun and doing some natural selection on those Viagra delivery boys on their little blue bikes and blue tights. I don't care if impulse purchases are up, I'm sick of them banging on my window. I mean do I *look* like I have that kind of problem? Heck no! I told them it was a one-time thing, because my wife was curious, but do they take me off their database? No! Instead they put my wife in. Man, when she found out I let that datum slip, I didn't need Viagra for a week -- because I was sleeping on the couch.)
Well, I gotta sign off. The phone's ringing. God, I Miss the days when I didn't have to answer! But half the office has that GPS Callee ID now, so they know damn well I'm sitting right here.
_____________
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
The problem with this technology is it closes the "last mile" of the privacy gap.
WHO:From the data on your frequant shopper card
WHAT:From your caller ID number and credit card information.
WHAT:From the data on your shopper card
WHERE:From the GPS information triangulating your position with a time stamp.
WHEN:From the time stamp in the GPS signal.
WHY:From the eshilon style monitoring system on your cell phone (logged to give advertisers better feedback on their adds effectivness)
___