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Bluetooth Ads Beamed from Billboards
dylanduck writes "Billboards in the UK have been using Bluetooth to beam media clips at passing cellular phones. The system has been dubbed Bluecasting and 17,000 people accepted the ads. When billboards know your name that's when to really worry."
Hope someone hacks it and starts bluecasting goatse in its place.
I hope high gas prices are depriving your children, you fucking dumbass.
Watch out, when someone figures out how to hack your bluetooth automatically, grab all your personal information and talor its advertisements accordingly, thats when I'm going to be afraid.
Given that using one's cellphone while driving is illegal in the UK..that's a lot of potential tickets right there.
Now that's what I call radio interference.
These filthy marketers are getting desperate.
So I wonder if these ads cost you money each time you drive past one of the billboards. Go figure
As if there weren't enough distracted drivers on the road. Now if people aren't yapping on their cell phones they'll be reading the myriad advertisements being beamed to them.
My name is double ROT13 encrypted. They can't use my name without violating the DMCA.
Thank you for travelling in the tube, Mr. Yakamoto. May we suggest some purchases for you?
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
for me if this is the kind of crap(innovation) we get with it. that would get old very quick. as if my phone doesn't interrupt my life enough, i need to add spam to it too?
no thanks
Of course, how many /.'ers actually leave BT enabled on their phones/PDAs?
DAMN YOU OCTODOG! DAMN YOU TO HELL!
This reminds me of Minority Report where the billboards were scanning peoples eyes and addressing them by name. Is this a case of life imitating art?
Be the first on your block to BUY COLGATE get one!
Can I have a cookie?
No.
Please?
No.
OK.
How about now?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
great..
now we will have bluetooth spam everywhere we go..
just what we need..
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
Otherwise, it's like a pop-up on your phone, asking if you'd like to see a pop-up ad.
"from the bricks to the booth...I predict the future like Cleo the psychic..."
Why didn't I think of this? I bet there's a lot of money to be made this way.
I've beeing seeing lots of ads for products that whiten teeth lately, but but who in their right mind would want...oh wait, nevermind.
Of course, how many /.'ers actually leave BT enabled on their phones/PDAs?
Forget enabled - you've got to be a real cabbage to leave it enabled and discoverable! This shows there are 17,000 really stupid people in that city. Or at least 1 really unfortunate guy who happens to live within blasting radius of the Bluetooth antenna.
Are the billboards going to be solving the problems in our life too? [imdb.com]
However they have had interactive billboards on the Tube for some time.
They concerned the use of unlicensed faux-minicabs to lure women into situations where they are abducted and often sexually abused.
The billboards allowed you to align your phone's IR receiver with a flashing icon to receive information on how to better protect yourself if you happen to be a woman.
I daresay Bluetooth seems rather more invasive as a means of delivering content - particularly commercial advertising rather than citizen's advice.
Honey, why are you getting ads for gay porn beamed to your cell phone?
Most people don't get too many bluetooth messages on their devices so when something like this happens they say "okay" to accept and see what the ad is all about. After a while people will get sick of it though, and fewer and fewer will accept them.
So this is good advertising.... for now... =)
This is exactly the same idea as email spam, sending off an advertisement to as many people as you can whether they asked for it or not. Forcing the user to have to click 'no' to get rid of it. We shouldn't have to cripple technology (IE turn off features on the phone) just to avoid being bombarded with a commercial for Dominoes Pizza. At least with a normal billboard if I don't want to see the message I can look somewhere else. I wish I lived there with a mobile phone just to be the first one to file a lawsuit against the companies sending out these ads.
LeoPolus Web Design: http://www.leopolus.com
trials of the system were recently held at six London railway stations
I imagine roadside billboards would not be used, it's bad enough in the US with intrusive bill boards on road sides.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Let's send the signal thru giant antennas and it will be encoded with electromagnetic waves, using Amplitude and Frequency Modulation. The devices are so simple they don't require digital technology.
With this, you can even choose with an analog dial, which emitters (let's call them "stations") to listen to the advertisers! Furthermore, why stop with advertising? Let's add content, like news or music, too!
Forget about podcasting, bluecasting. The future is "wavecasting"! It'll rock!
*Rushes to the patent office*
I was walking central London today when I got a message saying my mobile's bluetooth had an incoming message and asked if I wanted to accept it. Thinking I had finally found another toother, I quickly accepted thinking I was about to engage in depraved anonymous sex. Alas, 449 days of toothing in London and still no takers. Pretty soon I'm going to just assume bluetooth is a crap technology and just switch to raising the collars on my green polos.
http://www.mample.net
We are having enough with Email spams. Now they want you get Cell phone Spams. Really, when this gets worse, people will stop using technology altogether.
I'm gonna go to a river and go rod-casting!
Oh, I don't know. Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name, and they're always glad you came. You want to be where you can see our troubles are all the same. You want to be where everybody knows your name.
Cheers,
Ian
at least this one sort of makes sense. I mean assuming "X"casting is birthed from the idea of broadcasting, which if is not the case please kill me now, then yes you are broadcasting via the Bluetooth TM protocol to cell phones.
BUT...someone slap the marketing flunky who came up with "podcasting" because the content is actually pulled by clients (like RSS). I know I know it seems nitpicky but i hate it when technical words lose meaning and actually mis-describe things. It merely sets us back further as a whole on the road to technical progression/innovation.
Nope, it hasn't been dubbed BlueCasting, except by marketing twits in Italian suits and advertising twerps in Emo glasses.
The real world calls it SPAM. If you have to get trendy, BlueSpamming. Or if you want to get really wild, based on IM SPAM = SPIM, you get BLUE SPAM = SPLUE.
We let them use Hacker for Cracker, and we let them take Digital Rights Management for Digital Restriction Mechanisms. We control the names, folks, not them. A dog does not lay bioreclaimable fertilizer on the path, it shits on the sidewalk. "BlueCasting" sounds like a neat 21st century hip thing. "Spam" is a nasty annoyance that Russians get beat to death for. Give it the correct name.
We are having enough with Email spams. Now they want you get Cell phone Spams. Really, when this gets worse, people will stop using technology altogether.
Exactly. Low tech is the wave of the future.
In the Fremont neighborhood in Seattle, one of the most wired and tech neighborhoods, many of us no longer wear watches or carry cell phones, because they're a nuisance. We let loose the electronic leashes and savor the joy of life.
And then we go home and use our wireless laptops and high-speed cable/DSL/internet2 connections to surf the Net, or drop by a free wireless fair trade organic coffeeshop.
You can either be a slave of the Man, or you can opt out of the Man's rules.
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If my personal info is bluecasted, the people responsible will be Black-eyed using my "knuckle sandwich" v2 technology.
Dance Dance Revolution.
Yes, of course. This is why we develop more advanced technologies, such as radio, the television, the internet, and bluetooth. We just want more ads! Thanks a lot.
I wonder if, for some people, disabling their phone/device from being discovered via bluetooth will be a viable option? Maybe they need that enabled for something? Too bad there isn't a "DO NOT RECEIVE ADVERTISEMENTS" setting.
Thank God, bluetooth can be disabled.
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Isn't it a little scary that soon all the crazy paranoid people--those who think people are beaming messages into little chips planted in their belongings--aren't going to be saying anything too far-fetched?
We let them use Hacker for Cracker, and we let them take Digital Rights Management for Digital Restriction Mechanisms. We control the names, folks, not them. A dog does not lay bioreclaimable fertilizer on the path, it shits on the sidewalk. "BlueCasting" sounds like a neat 21st century hip thing. "Spam" is a nasty annoyance that Russians get beat to death for. Give it the correct name.
Good catch there. Since techies control the lingo, we determine the playing field.
BlueSpamming it is.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Out of all of the advertisements I've ever seen, I'd say I'm only interested in say...about 0.012% of them. Most of them are for boring-looking products or services. The problem is that too many companies are getting attention through their commercials (*cough*Allstate*cough) rather than having anything special about service.
Don't let Paris Hilton anywhere near England!
This kind of thing makes me very glad that I don't have a cell phone or watch TV.
Kids, remember that if you stop looking at advertising, it magically goes away.
So tell me, why would I ever want to own a phone with Bluetooth if they're doing this? They still make non-bluetooth phones and wired headsets? Right?
(I pick up 75 wireless access points on my 12 mile commute through what I thought was the countryside - so I can't imagine what this "bluecasting" will be like once it takes off in cities).
I can almost see the next step being advertisers pressuring phone makers to require always-on phones with always-on bluetooth so that they can't be "denied" the chance to spam your phone. You won't be able to switch the phone off, will only ever be able to switch to "silent mode" for a couple of hours at a time (like for going to a movie theater), and it'll automatically accept absolutely anything sent to it (and it'll simply keep the last 128MB [or however much storage the device has] of messages received). Just walking through the mall your phone will pick up 40 different advertising messages before you get to the store you wanted to go to - and when out driving, billboards and other cars will all repeatedly spam you.
And worst of all, they'll advertise this as being a "feature" of the phone ("get always-on bluecast so you're not left out! all the cool kids have it.. and you want to be cool.. don't you?") - and people will still buy it.
Does this meen people will have to circle back around top seen that kinky PlayBoy add again and again?
Couldn't get why only Billboards will send these bluetooth messages? It can be anything - a tree, a transport truck, a building, a shop - they are all going to torture you with these advertisements till you disable bluetooth or upgrade to "premium" service offered by well, your friendly wireless carrier!
Explore your creative side
billboards beam you
17,000 people got conned into downloading spam. How many of them do you think will do it next time? How long before there are laws against this sort of thing? CAN-BLAM?
FTA - "The posters detected 87,000 Bluetooth phones over a two week period, of which about 17% were willing to download the clip, says Scott."
First 17% is more like 14,790. I couldn't find a reference to the 17,000 number. (Perhaps its somewhere on the corporate web site link.) But even ignoring this point I'd still question the "willing" statement. Does that mean people intentionlly enabled access to their cell phones. Or is it more like 17% of blue tooth cell phonesare left unsecured by their owners?
Sort of like claiming 40% of PCs are "willing" to be zombies for spam.
Back in 2001, I worked on something very similar to this as part of my senior project. I think somebody owes me money.
Life is life . . . everything else is just a stupid T-shirt slogan.
I will not read Bluetooth Spam
I will not read it, Sam I am.
I will not read it in the tube,
I will not read it even if it shows me a boob
I will not read it in my car
I will not read it in a bar
I do not like Bluetooth spam
I do not like it, Sam I am.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Nah, just curious. The first time they do this, 17,000 people will accept the "blue-vert". Of those 17,000, the next time, only 7,000 people will accept. The third time, 700.
Eventually the new technology will penetrate the common consciousness and people will just start ignoring it, since it is, after all, thoroughly useless and annoying. The only thing it has going for it is its novelty. Once that's dried up, "blue-vertising" will go away and die.
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
Phone Bleeps:
A new life awaits you in the Off-World colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure.
Let's go to the Colonies! This announcement has been brought to you by the Shimago-Dominguez Corporation. Helping America into the New World.
You do find so many people who leave their bluetooth on and it can't be by accident - they go to the trouble of naming their access point. Just sit on the bus or train and there will be a few around. The problem is the battery hit and the paranoia - people are reluctant to accept anything incase its a 'virus'. Just start sending out goatse with some big company names printed over it as your very own brand of 'advertising' - i have a feeling that might catch on a bit more.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I wonder if a virus could be passed this way and if it could then you could have infected at least 17,000 people via blue tooth.
SPUE is a better contraction for SPAM and Bluetooth...
Now go ehway or I shall tauntu a second timeh!
Personal information wouldn't be the most valuable thing in this context. A geographical metric of campaign attach rate would be.
Say I have a limited budget for an outdoor campaign (billboards, posters, cabs etc) and want to make the most of my money. Do I put more billboards in city a, b or c? I could do a limited run of the ad with this system and look at the aggregate rate of accept/offer over this system. The areas that get the greatest acceptance rates get the largest amount of billboards and such in my main campaign launch.
This is known as "optimization". It happens in banner ads all the time. You give 5 banners to your ad service and the first 10,000 (or whatever numer) impressions are analized for click-performance and the 3 lowest-performers are dynamically dropped, so you only pay for the most successful banners.
I could see this being used to optimize outdoor campaigns. It wouldn't even require that any data be collected from the phone... just metadata (how many people accepted the offer and how many were offered.)
Now, were an advertiser to take the personal information from your phone and sell it to jerks... that will either be illegal or people will start destroying your devices (they are in public places, after all) and you lose your investment. Maybe even both. So it's not worth it... on top of being morally screwed up.
Besides, why "take" personal information when people give it to you at the cash register? I mean, those coupons are designed to do just that. And it's better info anyway. A list of people who bought in response to the campaign as opposed to random noise you stole off somebodies phone.
Yea, I'm shocked that so many people were interested in ColdPlay, too /duck
In order to be detected, every single one of those 87k phones had their bluetooth enabled. 14k is the number who answered "Ok, send me the clip", I assume... a pretty high number. This has marketing dweebs wetting themselves, I'm sure.
Honestly.
Is it possible to go anywhere or do anything these days without being advertised at? Seems you just can't get away from it anymore.
In any case, if I'm standing on a train platform looking at a billboard, I can just read the damn billboard. What is the point of sending me a message to tell me about what's on the billboard?
You must be new hear. Hmm, how about slashdot bluecasting TFA to someone as soon as they click on the summary, thus forcing everyone to RTFA before they post stupid comments?
exactly,
first it's:
'Oh wow video!', 'I didn't know my phone did video..', 'Neat!'
then it quickly becomes:
'oh sod off'
(may read 'IMHO' wherever omitted from above text)
BUT...someone slap the marketing flunky who came up with "podcasting" because the content is actually pulled by clients (like RSS).
okay, we'll just call it podpulling from now on then..
(may read 'IMHO' wherever omitted from above text)
Just like email-vertising died the same way.
Oh, wait...
sort of like that 50's tele-vision advertizing.
what a fad that turned out to be.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
Somehow, I can see these "bill boards" getting vandalized, and having the xmiter removed or the message changed to a more usefull message, Kill Your Television!
Anyway, personally I find that BlueSpew has the right ring for this crap.
find an old pda and have it 'bluecast' porn.
Sit it next to a real coke bluecaster, and then half the time that people choose to "Accept connection from Coke?" they'll get the porn.
Bluetooth doesn't have a whole lot of authentication other than the name that the other node chooses.
It wont take many calls to a large companies complaint department about them dispatching porn before this whole dumb idea will go away.
Is it me, or is Blue Tooth (or BlueTooth, or whatever) becoming the Windows of wireless protocols? I don't have any blue tooth devices, but all I ever read about blue tooth is how it is used as a virus vector, and now a spam vector.
It sounds more like airvertising than 'bluecasting'.
just wait till the day these ads scan your retina and mistakenly call you "Mr. Yamamoto".
Coderz 4 Life
The big 2 cell phone providers are Rogers and Bell (there's others but they're a lot smaller). Neither of them have a cellphone that has bluetooth yet. BTW the Treo 650 and Blackberry devices do have bluetooth but they're just glorified PDAs with cell phone capability that costs an arm and a leg.
I could buy a phone from the US and get it hacked, but why should I lose a warranty and pay a couple hundred dollars when I should be able to get one for FREE or close to it ($99 at most).
How long has bluetooth been an option on cell phones in the US and Europe and yet I still can't get one here.
All I want it is so that I can receive calls on my BT headset and use Sailling Clicker to control my iBook.
To make matters worse
Futureshop (owned by BestBuy), advertised a BT headset right beside the non-BT cell phones instead of in the computer section of the weekly flier.
After that one I thought you'd be here all week.
Bluetooth ads beamed from billboards... in space!
Actually like Ethernet cards and the like, Bluetooth Adapters too have an unqiue 48bit MAC which can be used to trace people. I don't really know a hell of
a lot about Bluetooth and its protocols but I can
imagine that a device that sends a connection request might get a reply back of the like "I got your request to connect to application X, now hold on while I signal the user and ask her if it is okay". In this case the advertiser gets the MAC even though the user does not authorize the connectino.
I'm sick of marketers encroaching into my personal space with their advertising. Putting ads on racecars or on the sides of their buildings is one thing, but when my email box is filled with spam, my fax machine is printing out pages I don't want, and my phone is receiving ads I don't want they're going too far.
Do we really need ads coming at us from everywhere? Is nothing sacred anymore? Now we also have to put up with advertising on billboards?!
I love the "Furthermore, there is no risk of downloading viruses or other malware to the phone, says O'Regan: "We don't send applications or executable code.""
Riiiight.
I find the whole notion of this distasteful. Billboards are bad enough. This is adding spam to them. I don't use Bluetooth now (see no real benefit from it really) and if enabling Bluetooth is going to subject me to spam, no thanks . . .
But, considering in 2000 the hot marketing gimmick was to mount Palm Pilot's around metropolitan areas (at least Manhattan had them) and have people point their Palm at it to sync up an ad . . . and that lasted like a month . . .
My Motorola V551 has blue tooth. Maybe you haven't looked hard enough. There are blue tooth phones.
I'd be willing provided it's a two way thing and I could first beam the senders my terms and conditions, including the charges for using my phone as their electronic billboard.
AT&ROFLMAO
Another reason to refuse to have a cell phone. Beside the irritating rining when you're doing something (driving, having a conversation, reading, having sex), people seem to think that cell phones MUST be answered, and ALWAYS pick up.
I don't need to be constantly "in touch." You can email me and I'll see it later on.
is that 17,000 people then went looking for a way to turn the @#$%^*()! Bluetooth pop-up cr@p off...
Oh well, what the hell...
Let's get spelling correct before we mention others' grammar.
Nothing new... just use any BT PDA or PC with MeetingPoint http://www.net-cell.com/mp
Quite a few years ago, I was riding in the car with my buddy Mike and his wife. We were going out to the movies and we weren't quite sure where the cinema was. Off in the distance, we saw a giant electronic sign flashing my buddy's name "Michael". Sure enough, it was the movie theatre. We thought it was very odd, until we realized the sign was just referring to the John Travolta angel movie, which was playing at the theatre.
"Was it a millionaire who said 'Imagine No Posessions?'" -- Elvis Costello
Off-topic, and very slightly tongue-in-cheek:
:-)
Although telcos, in the US and elsewhere, suck royal dick 24/7, having the recipient pay for incoming calls turns out to have advantages, rooted in the fact that it liberates you from the real telco {mono|oligo}poly: The PSTN numbering cartel.
Consider something like UMA, only turned inside-out: Instead of making your mobile number your "public" number, you use your SIP/IAX endpoint for that instead. Since a lot of your customers/friends/colleagues etc still use the PSTN, you give it a nice PSTN proxy through a VoIP operator that supports this.
When you're out of the house/office your SIP endpoint is forwarded to your mobile number. You can do that for zero incremental cost - to the original caller - in the US because you'll be paying the termination fees through your incoming airtime.
Add the advent of WiFi-capable mobiles and the proliferation of free hotspots in the places you're likely to use your mobile (home-work-starbucks-mall) and you have a very juicy, extremely low barrier-to-entry lever over the mobile operators.
In the rest of the world this would not be possible because the initiator of the mobile leg of the call (your asterisk box/subscription service) will have to pay the high (captive market, fun fun fun!) termination fees the mobile operator charges. This is where not paying for incoming airtime works against you: Cost is not the only problem here; the major problem is that this makes you have to buy [or subscribe to someone who buys] into the PSTN numbering cartel in order to get a number with a high enough termination "cushion" to cover the cost. The barrier to entry has been somewhat safely defended...
Of course, in the US and elsewhere, the operators are going to do everything they can to stop all this from happening. Some of it may even be meaningful, like offering decent UMA rates (don't hold your breath, this sounds too much like competition). When WiFi mobiles get introduced in the US I expect to get a laugh from their T&Cs and general brain-dead-ness when they try to both sell and cripple WiFi at the same time
So which phones can do bluetooth messaging? My SonyEricsson phone cannot do messaging via bluetooth. Is there a new BT messaging standard or do certain brands have their own BT messaging implementation?
There is no sig.
> find an old pda and have it 'bluecast' porn.
Been there, Done That, Got the T-Shirt.
We recently played a 'battle of the bands' gig.
Our bass player thogught it might be a 'cool' idea to spam everyone in the auidience with a bluecast of our band logo and next gig dates. Nobody could convince him that this would just piss people off [1]. The guys at the mixing desk said they would do it on his behalf though.
The fact that the mixing desk used this guys kit to send goatse to every bluetooth phone (rather popular in the UK) in the audience didn't suprise us at all :-)
[1] that and anyone playing with a movile phone during a gig is probably a tosser anyway
Unless of course it's actually good content. Then of the 17000 7000 will each tell 5 friends, who next time they pass a "blue-vert" will accept it - thus next time 42,000 will accept, the third time 103,765 will accept, and so on until world domination is achieved.
this is really news, I just waited about two years to see something like this. I actually wrote a small app. that does something like this about 1.5 years ago http://www.mulliner.org/bluetooth/#bjod.
All I know is that the evangelical teen rock&roll churches are going to jump on this. Read the bible from your phone! TXT 777 to absolve your sins! And don't forget, church donation micropayments...
There is a report here detailing the gender mix of bluetooth users and which devices they are carrying around with them. The survey was taken in central London using a passive collector but I'd assume the ratios are the same the world over. N.
This reminds me about all of the buzz about targeting peoples cellphones that had GPS turned on. "Turn left here for great eat's at Identity Theft Cafe"
Fortunately, that has seemed to fade away. UNfortunately, Bluetooth ads are much easier, unless it comes to the US and they want to target Verizon customers, since Verizon sells "Bluetooth" phones with their balls chopped off.
Imagine being somewhere like a casino (where you can bet they already or will soon will use face recognition on everyone). Cameras could be positioned in certain places to automatically recognise a person and change all the machines and signs within the proximity to be more appealing.
Hell, I bet a system could pitch different ads depending on whether a man, women, or kids were walking past based on their smell. For extra sophistication it could even detect BO & perfume as giveaways of the person's wealth and status.
Unlike *typical* spam, I think that should read. The name "spam" (to my mind) isn't about how useless the content of the message is, but instead the unsolicited nature of it.
The "OFF" switch - why The Matrix will never be true.
--
But I'm Conroy's plant!
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In soviet russia, billboards read YOU!
Had this happen to me in the Virgin Atlantic lounge in Heathrow just a week ago - it tried to come into my powerbook, and I had to keep declining an asp or some kind of media file 'push'. (don't remember exactly what it was)
Kind of cool, but there was definitely no way I was going to accept it.
embedded in software that was stolen from me and distributed as open source.
"He's a real midnight golfer"
The same people who actually buy things advertised in spam, I suppose.
I think this is somewhat akin to Minority Report, wherein video billboards identify a person by his retinas from a distance and change the billboard accordingly. Except now they aren't changing something that's their property, but mine. Jerks.
Is spoofing a MAC address for bluetooth any less trivial than it is for Ethernet?
^o^
Yeah, you're right. Rogers does have the Motorola V551 and the Sony Ericsson T637 both of which have bluetooth capability. Last time I checked Rogers webiste was almost half a year ago and the didn't have any real cell phones w/ BT (not incl. Treo 650 and Blackberry). I have checked the Bell website and store flyers around once a month since I got a Bell 3-year contract a couple months back and Bell doesn't have any yet.
On the off-chance that you have Bluetooth on and your device is discoverable [presumably because you want to receive random stuff from ther people] and you are asked if you want to receive a BlueCast and you respond "no" we opt you out.
Since the content we send out if kinda neat - like free Coldplay clips which you'd normally pay £3.00 for - we've not had any complaints to date. The key here is that based on proximity and the time of day we're able to deliver valued-added content that people actually want... which I would say is a far cry from spam.
That said, it's great to see such a lively discussion about what were doing and you can be sure we take such comments [both good and bad] to the table to see how we can improve the service.
In the future, as phones provide better Bluetooth functionality, we'll transition to a system where the user "pulls" content from the billboards and can choose from a selection of content which suits them.