Pay-For-Visit Advertising

theodp writes "US patent office documents released Thursday show that a startup named Pelago is seeking a patent covering Pay-For-Visit Advertising, which uses GPS, Bluetooth, or RFID on your mobile devices to track your travels to see if you wander into a place of business that appeared in an ad shown earlier on your cellphone, PDA, or laptop. To maximize ad revenue, phone calls are also tracked to see if you dial a number associated with an ad, and financial transactions are examined to see if you make a purchase from an advertiser. The application goes on to note that the system may be of interest to government agencies. Pelago just raised $7.4M from the likes of KPCB and Jeff Bezos."

Comments

Re:Gasp!

[Penguinisto]

But that is not the slashdot way, we want NO adds but still we want our websites to run for free even though these people deticate their lives full time to this and have expenses too. Good targeting means less adds, more revenue to web sites, and less anoyances during the day.

Okay... here's some small tips that may help:

• If a website or other media delivery vehicle tends to specialize (e.g. /. tends to specialize in IT and geek pr0n), you tailor your advertisements to your primary market. If I go to a 3d/CG hobbyist art website, I expect to see ads for the likes of Poser, Bryce, DAZ, etc, with maybe some low-end Maya, 3DS Max and such thrown in. I don't expect to see mortgage ads in either place. (If I do, then obviously the site owner is operating sans clue, which almost subliminally makes my opinion of the content to be a bit suspect. After all, if they can't grok their audience, then how do I know that they truly grok what they're presenting otherwise?)
• This does not require complex GPS tracking, retina scanning, or any other such crap. It merely means that the site owners need to know their primary and secondary readership.
• For general purpose websites (like a newspaper, say) you can use cookies based on what type of content the user reads more often than not. Again, no need to an RFID chip in someone's left ear to do that
• Even on a mobile scale, the best way to know if an ad works is the old-fashioned way, just updated: Put a friggin' "Save X% off your purchase if you display the linked coupon page on your iPhone/Treo/etc to the server at the counter!" with some unique splotch of numbers and letters on that "coupon" can that can be punched in by the guy taking your money. See? No need to assign facial recognition software to every mobile's camera or something...

In short, there are a ton of ways to make your advertising revenue work for you (as a business) and at the same time not have to resort to some bullshit intrusion that only adds bloat and inconvenience to the user's equipment and resources.

/P

Re:Consumer participation required?

[BUL2294]

And you might have noticed that some DVD players don't let you skip ads, previews and other nuisances.

It's not that the DVD players don't let you skip these nuisances, it's that the chapter/title/whatever tells the DVD player to not let you skip them. There are valid reasons why you shouldn't be allowed to skip chapters on some DVDs (i.e. a DVD-video based game played on your TV, or an educational DVD that tests you and your answers determine the next question, etc.) but, IMHO, no DVD movie that you paid $$$ for has a valid reason for not allowing you to skip chapters. The studios are just abusing the system and pissing off their customers... (Hence the popularity of DVD movie backup software that lets you rip the feature film only...)