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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."
These filthy marketers are getting desperate.
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.
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..."
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... =)
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.
Thank God, bluetooth can be disabled.
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the USPTO might just be dumb enough to give you a patent on that, too... :)
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.
So, if accessing an available Wifi access point is illegal, per the recent cases in Florida and the UK, wouldn't accessing my phone also be illegal access of a computer (since a mobile phone is technically a computer these days), and wouldn't someone be able to sue these BlueSpammers for unauthorized access?
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.
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
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?
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.
You do realize that billboards are NOT only on highways but on city streets, right? Where pedestrians see them.
Not only that, the "pod" part is pretty inaccurate, since the iPod itself has nothing to do with the technology, it's just a way to play the downloaded audio.
Mod parent funny! Lovely reference. I was thinking the very same thing.