In 2006 a young man called William Donelson went into a piercing shop in Ontario to get a RFID chip inserted into his hand. His goal was to be able to log on to his computer and unlock specially modified doors just by waving his hand at them. No more losing or fumbling with keys or passwords.
The same motivation has spurred Billy Chasen of Turntable.fm to create a door lock for this office that can opened by sending it a text message. No skin slicing involved.
There’s a couple of cool things this lock does:
When you text ‘close’ it will text you back ‘closed’ once it’s been locked.
If you text ‘status’ it will tell you whether the door is locked or not
Ability to create a whitelist of people that are also allowed to unlock the door.
If you’ve been reading this blog over the past year you’ll remember me ranting on about how there is a genuine business case for restaurants, brands and retailers to take their PDF/email voucher campaigns and make them SMS.
The situation still remains the same, Pizza Express, GBK, La Tasca, Gap and all the other places you know and love STILL make you print vouchers that have NO UNIQUE codes on them. If paper isn’t tracked, why should mobile to start off with? When consumers gradually change their behaviour and begin to use these things THEN look towards EPOS upgrades and improvements, I’m not saying tracking isn’t important, but right now all you need is a single SMS without anything dynamic.
This doesn’t call for some expensive, 3rd party solution, it just needs to be something you can show at point of sale. Unfortunately the industry is littered with people who want to over complicate this by trying to license their technology, stalling any sort of progress with custom solutions that require some impact of the business, whether it’s EPOS configurations or coupon management systems.
Anyway, so it looks like YO! Sushi have taken the first step towards saving some trees and me having to buy ink for my printer – by introducing SMS vouchers instead of paper. JOY!
I’d been waiting for the day when I got my weekly Money Saving Expert email from Martin containing an offer using SMS and today it happened. Good offer too, check it out:
If you text in you’ll get back a unique code which you give to the cashier. YO! Sushi have fancy EPOS terminals so I’m guessing they can accept codes without too much effort? Would be nice to get some clarification on this anyone?
I think the iTagg are the guys behind this, good work!
If you live and holiday in Europe you tend to not worry about sharks when splashing about in the sea, but now that I’ve moved to Sydney the chances of me getting eaten have increased considerably making me wary of every bit of seaweed and shadow in the water.
My current method of shark attack prevention is making sure that there are at least 10 or more people in front of me so I don’t land the first bite.
Luckily scientists have come up with a slightly more advanced way to stop people from getting hurt. They’ve tagged over 70 great white sharks with transmitters which trigger any of 18 acoustic seabed receivers. Whenever a shark is close to a beach or shoreline, the receivers fire off an SMS message to life guards within 2 minutes of first detection.
Just been flicking through the news I missed last week and saw this little gem.
When The Cove won the Oscar for Best Documentary, one of its producers, Ric O’Barry held up a sign saying “Text DOLPHIN to 44144″ which directs people to sign a petition to shut down dolphin slaughter in the Cove. The petition will be sent to President Obama and the Japanese Ambassador to the U.S., Ichiro Fujisaki.
The cameras cut away a few seconds after the sign was held up (you can watch it here) but even still 32,000 responses came flooding in. Once the news started to spread over Twitter and blogs, it went even higher.
This got me thinking, what if this happened on the biggest stage in the entire world…the World Cup Finals?
For a long time it’s been clear in my mind where mobile advertising is heading – firmly in the hands of handset manufacturers. Google and Apple now have their own ad networks meaning the two user experience juggernauts will own where the ads come from as well as where they appear.
I keep banging on about the opportunity they have to ‘redefine’ mobile advertising and ‘start from scratch’. What I mean by this is that the limitations of many current methods such as SMS, MMS, Bluetooth and banner ads can be erased because the manufacturers can make up completely new ad channels that utilise features of the phone. And because this will be achieved by using data rather than messaging, it allows for better value for advertisers using CPC, CPA and CPM. All this has influenced the following concept..
The Concept
On device semantic SMS advertising would turn every SMS the user ever sends or receives into an advertising opportunity for the manufacturer. At first that might sound massively intrusive but it’s all about the execution.
The thought that spawned this concept was making advertising so useful that it could change its perception in the eyes of the user so they wouldn’t even question its placement on the phone. I wanted to blur the lines so the user would see it as a tool rather than a direct ad channel.
It works by recognising keywords or the meaning of the sentence/conversation within an SMS and adding dynamic functionality to those words. For example, your friend asks you if you want to go to the cinema, the word ‘cinema’ would be highlighted and clicking it would reveal cinemas in the area.
Within a few clicks you can find out film times and buy a ticket, all within the device interface. This purchase can be tracked and the manufacturer gets a cut of the profits.
Mobile solutions company Incentivated power the new SMS flight info service for British Airways. Fantastic, SMS is easy peasy, so let’s hear more about it:
The service, available for UK- and US-registered mobile phones, enables users to get up-to-the-minute flight information for yesterday, today and the next five days. Users text D for Departures or A for Arrivals followed by a space, the departure date of the flight (in the form DDMMYY or MMDDYY for the US) and the British Airways flight number (eg BAXXXX) to 60747 in the UK, 70615 in the US.
OOohh laawwd – how the hell is anyone meant to use this service again if they have to remember all that?
So I decided to give it a try and deliberately entered false details to see if I would get a error message back saying explaining how to do it correctly. I.e “Sorry that was wrong, please try again by entering D or A….”
Ever since the dawn of time mobile marketers have been using the ‘Starbucks coupon’ example to sell the idea of location based coupons into brands and businesses. I’ve used it a few times because it’s the easiest way to explain to someone who’s ‘non-mobile’ about location and the possibilities.
The scenario goes like this, you sign up for a mobile coupon service, fill out your profile, ticking coffee and various other things as your interests. You walk past Starbucks one day and BAM, your mobile beeps and it’s a 20% discount SMS coupon for a cup of coffee. Then you stroll in, extremely happy and redeem your coupon. Win for you and a win for Starbucks.
This basically applies to the concept by operator AT&T, the idea is simple, as consumers walk around a city, they get mobile alerts whenever their favourite nearby stores and restaurants have a deal. It works by the mobile operator constantly monitoring the customers location (opt-in of course), then matching that info to available retailers to push coupons/info.
Sounds great, apart from one problem….it uses SMS.
Firstly you will never escape the fact that SMS advertising messages are intrusive. They arrive into your inbox just like personal messages, they don’t have a separate folder, they don’t arrive silently, they don’t generate a different on-screen alert or icon. Oh and if it’s a coupon, you can’t sort by expiry date.
Just like any consumer, I’m interested in around 100+ different brands, everything from clothing, electronics, all the way to peanut butter. Do I want discounts on these brands? Hell yes (I love those printed vouchers), gimme as much as possible. Do I want my phone beeping several times a day and my inbox filling up? Hell no.
No matter how targeted the coupon is, there is no way a location based SMS service can remain useful and scale to cover the amount of brands an average consumer likes without severely pissing them off, regardless of opting-in. Read more…
God damn you Nike, letting your agencies run wild and be massively innovative with the brand. How dare you.
I totally missed this campaign which ran in the summer, it’s brilliant all round. Nike teamed up with the guys at Tour De France to display messages of “hope, perseverance and love” with the road-printing Chalk Bot. Read more…
Hi my name is Murat, I'm a mobile creative and UX/UI designer based in London. I like coming up with ideas and making things.
This is my personal blog focusing on mobile, creativity, agencies, innovation, advertising, thoughts, projects and interesting stuff.
You can say hello hereFollow @mutlu82
