Beepoint gets CNC approval

This month we got the CNC approval for out Bluetooth Proximity Marketing solution after succesfully passing all radio test in the lab.

Although our solution was already approved by the FCC and the UE, local regulations in Argentina requires that any radio equipment that operates in this country to be approved by the National Communications Comission (CNC) regardless of any approval in other countries.

This is good news as it allow us to keep giving the best service to our clients and to reassure that our solutions are focused on delivering the best quality.

QR codes for all

A snippet about a show off of our solutions in last July at the Rural Exposition show. We focused on showing a QR codes enable tourism application of Buenos Aires City, but also run a bluetooth marketing campaign for the City of Buenos Aires government.

Our application provides information necessary for any tourist on the city bout historic places, bars, maps, important icons, and hot spots in the city, as well as the ability to photograph special QR codes to get information related to the visitor's place.

The main proposition was the deployment of QR codes over these places to help people visiting our city find important services, public transport and information about the neighbourhood around.

I was astonished to see how receptive the people were about the concept we were showing, and we are very proud to be the first company doing such a move on this latitudes :)

Lyngoh

This is a rather late posting about our last week launch of a revamped version of Lyngoh - a platform that is looking to provide ways to simplify how we can get to content on the mobile.

Basically, Lyngoh allows you to create personal shortcodes to any content and provides the way get to them by different means.

The available methods at this moment to decode the shortcodes are:

• by using our mobile website from your phone's browser (m.lyngoh.com) and writing the text shortcode.
• by sending an SMS to a number with the text shortcode, then we send you a response with the content.
• by taking a picture to a Lyngoh-generated 2D code using any of the standard readers available.

Currently we support QR Code and Datamatrix and we will add support for any other open and widely used 2D code in the future.

Lyngoh also has a widget that can be included on websites to provide instant and meaningful related content to mobiles while browsing any site.

We also created an API so third party applications can be integrated with Lyngoh.

Finally, if you create a user account, you could manage a number of shortcodes or lyngohs (this is how we call them), dinamically change the content they represent and also get some information about the visitors.

I hope it proves to be useful to all of you.

See you all on the next post!

Motorola - Motorokr Band Warz

With our friends from Tublip we run an exciting campaign for Motorola from April to July, I'd like to share here.

The Motorokr Band Warz is a yearly contest where not-much-know (at least not by me) music bands compete against each other to gain popularity and eventually the opportunity to play along with a much more experienced and popular band like "The go team".

This year, the winning band also won the opportunity to record a CD and get produced by a professional musician,. i.e Juanchi Baleirón.


At Beepoint, we took care of the whole mobile solution for the rokr contest:

• Bluetooh content distribution over the Motorokr van.
  
• SMS campaign for voting the bands.
  
• Mobile website and J2Me application for fans to follow the contest on the go!
• Online SMS-to-Screen votes and bluetooth content distribution inside rokr's live matches.

This multi-channel campaign was focused on letting everyone participate but at the same time providing a value added experience to those who had a more advanced handset. The other main objective was to immerse the public into the experience and make them feel part of each band.

Finally, I share with you a couple of pictures from the different live events and the van around the city.

Horton and Jumper - FOX@Village Cinemas

During March and April we carried on a mobile marketing campaign with FOX for the premiere of Horton "Hears a Who!" and Jumper in three different Village Cinemas in Argentina.

The campaign lasted about two months and included the distribution of a number of contents by proximity to the call-to-actions present in each cinema. Wallpapers, video trailers and games were available for download to a large audience and we saw great interest in the contents.


One of the objectives of this campaign was to reach a young public and to understand how people's interest in content correlated with the audience for each movie at every cinema.

For the first time it was clearly possible to measure the response to the marketing investment and to get specific and detailed information about the number of downloads, acceptance to each content, hot hours and days, the share of mobile brands, and the most popular locations.

Above a picture of the standee used for this campaign at the Village Recoleta location.

Goodyear Pinamar 08

I'm trying to catch-up with all the things that have happened during the last months.

At the beginning of this year we have been on the Pinamar beach along with Goodyear on a marketing campaign that included our Proximity Marketing solution.

We distributed a great variety of contents to the public that included wallpapers, invitations to events and videos for more than a month.

Response from the public was exceptional and the objective of augmenting the acknowledgment of the campaign was achieved succesfully.

Android

I'm trying to keep a life-support minimum of a blogpost/month. I would like to post more often but I find it so difficult these days.

So far there must be thousands of blogposts and reviews about Google's new OS and SDK for mobile devices. They made a very noisy launch of their new Mobile Platform (OS + SDK). Well, not really so noisy but whatever Google does shake the ground all over the Internet community.


I think it is a brave move from Google to get into a market where some big names are entrenched to eliminate any opposition, the most active players Nokia, Microsoft, Apple, not even mention the Mobile Operators to whom Google is fighting a battle to get the 700MHZ band in the US.
Google seems to be using all its firepower to get a piece of what I think it's the natural extension of the Internet into the real world, your mobiles.
The challenge is huge but every player has what it takes to make it really interesting to follow.

As far as I've seen from a technical point of view Android gives more power developers to create new services as it provides an extensive API to manage different aspects of the mobile's capabilities. This is a serious limitation in today's J2ME-enabled phones, and as a consequence you have to deal with different and sometimes erratic implementations of the same API. J2ME was built as a restricted subset of the main J2SE classes with "portability" in mind, however we cannot say that this was accomplished flawlessly. Although it provides optional packages with additional functionalities on certain phones, you will always find yourself doing a balance between portability and funcionality and that really cut the possibility to make your ideas real.

It is not clear to me yet how Google is going to promote the adoption of their Android phones in a market of billions of handsets. At the end of the day, this is the most important factor, no company will create services for a platform that doesn't have a critical mass of users. However, as a first move, Google have called the attention of thousands of developers around the world to use their imagination and create applications to have a good set of software when the first set of phones are launched.

I leave you with a couple of videos that describes Android's architecture:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBGfUs9mQYY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fL6gSd4ugSI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPukbH6D-lY