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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."
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.
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
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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...
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)
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