Beepoint

Beepoint gets CNC approval

abarmat@gmail.com (Ariel Barmat) — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 11:29:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Christian Hentschel) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 21:09:00 +0000

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

abarmat@gmail.com (Ariel Barmat) — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 22:43:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Christian Hentschel) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 22:04:00 +0000

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

abarmat@gmail.com (Ariel Barmat) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 05:16:00 +0000

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

abarmat@gmail.com (Ariel Barmat) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 18:19:00 +0000

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

abarmat@gmail.com (Ariel Barmat) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 04:14:00 +0000

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

The way to Mobile 2.0

abarmat@gmail.com (Ariel Barmat) — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 19:42:00 +0000

I found this interesting picture that show the evolution of the markup languages for the mobile web during the years.

It's interesting to see how XHTML replaced the obsolete WML and the appearance of quite new players like Flash Lite. I haven't seen many applications written in Flash Lite but they will definitely have a place.
On the other hand for this picture to be complete we should add J2ME, Symbian and Brew. They are not markup languages but they play a big role on the mobile tech landscape as well as Flash Lite. In fact, many mobile sites have an XHTML version for browsers and a more polished and user-friendly version in the form of a "stand-alone" application (e.g. google gmail). There are also many Mobile Widget Engines coming out that make easier the way to create appealing applications on the handsets that consumes services from the web.

I will discuss the Mobile Site vs. Widgets in another post as it is an interesting topic in itself.

Mobile User Experience

abarmat@gmail.com (Ariel Barmat) — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 02:49:00 +0000

The other day while browsing on the Internet I found this interesting picture that I think is a fantastic graphical description of all the things that affect user experience when using a mobile application.

Following the picture, on the outer circle we have “culture” which apply to many types of software not exclusively to mobile, and right inside “environment” and “activity”, these last two items are more specific to mobile and relates to location and what the user is doing at that place. These can drive to user interactions that tend to satisfy needs called “goals” and will end to be the purpose of the mobile application. To accomplish these goals the user can perform a series of “task” provided by the application. The user is also constantly affected by the surrounding environment so the level of “attention” can vary greatly with time. Then it comes the real challenge, the “user interface”, a place where many applications fail. The interface plays an important role because it's mission is to balance the devices multimedia capabilities, the quality of the wireless connection, and the type of services carriers provide with the social environment where the users are without affecting the seamless execution of the goals.
In my opinion the interface can also be interpreted as the connection between technology and the social environment that in consequence require social-aware software to blend these two sometimes distant worlds.

VoIP 2.0

abarmat@gmail.com (Ariel Barmat) — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 14:08:00 +0000

From time to time I look on the Internet the latest news about startups and I see that most of them are Web 2.0 sites, especially social networking sites which are really trendy these days. But lately I found a couple of them related with what it's called VoIP 2.0. Having worked for many years on VoIP applications in the telco business I found this concept really interesting. Today we see 2.0 everywhere, especially if you live connected you will notice buzz words appearing and dissappearing like never seen before (maybe on the Internet bubble?). There are Web 2.0, Mobile 2.0, Marketing 2.0, Business 2.0 and more.

VoIP 2.0 brings the colaborative approach of the Web 2.0 to the telco world. Up to now, there were new applications and services that brought cheaper calls to the end-users, long-distance calls, flat rates and facilitating the way we make calls using a computer. The best of those examples is Skype. But now we are seeing new VoIP applications that not only focus on reducing your phone bill, but providing new services in a completely different approach than a telco.

GrandCentral is a fantastic example of new services applied to VoIP. Basically their goal is to give the user a central number for all their phone numbers, a central voicemail box to have all the messages in one place, and they let you manage how you want the calls to be delivered to you. This company was recently acquired by Google :)

Ooma is another startup that looks really promising and they go for a full revolution on the VoIP world. They look to create a network of devices that will route calls P2P within the Omma community by VoIP transport before using the PSTN. This way as the Ooma community grows more calls will be within the VoIP network. They will not charge users for the calls but will add new premium services.

2.0 is about new ideas that combine and grow thanks to the power of the evolving Internet, +bandwidth, mesh of service, collaboration, and influences every aspects of everything that is connected to the www.

Scalable Web

noreply@blogger.com (Christian Hentschel) — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 21:52:00 +0000

I was googling for some time about how big Web 2.0 projects scale. Hey, not me but big guys like Google, Flickr, Digg, and so others do really have to think about zillions of users and page views per seconds.

If you share my interest in this topic, I'd recommend to have a look at this slide show from Cal Henderson - (Flickr) - about performance and scalability issues in web 2.0 development.

Heating Up

abarmat@gmail.com (Ariel Barmat) — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 01:40:00 +0000

Things are heating up on the mobile space. Every day I see new companies coming out looking to get a fraction of the mobile screen. Most of the start-ups are related with Web 2.0 services but there are many on the mobile side too, and as time passes the borderline between Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 is vanishing.

If you are a fan of Techcrunch and Mobilecrunch you already know that these two sites hold an amazing collection of start-ups reviewed by Oliver Star and Michael Arrington;it is the perfect place to get the latest news. If you don't, I recommend you to read their reviews. My partner Christian never misses a chance to have a look at those sites :)

Context Awareness

abarmat@gmail.com (Ariel Barmat) — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 02:41:00 +0000

Today I’ll write about Proximity Marketing, a type of context-aware application or location-based service which consists in the localized content delivery to mobiles within an area using short-range wireless technology. Proximity technology can be used to provide informational services, alerts, distribute content and sending marketing material to a targeted audience. As every kind of mobile marketing action it requires traditional advertising to be in place to produce the call-to-action effect.

At Beepoint we have a solution that enables contextual content delivery based on profiles and allows configuring campaigns using a wide number of parameters. Our solution is easily extensible so it can be used on multiple scenarios and combined with other platforms to create innovative contextual services.

I searched on Google doing some research and found a couple of companies providing similar solutions, and discovered, to my surprise, a number of them selling this as you would sell just an ad spitting box, get your CD, burn it and do it yourself. I mean, this should be carefully implemented so that the user experience is taken care all the time. As I heard in many occasions, content is the KING so the effectiveness of a campaign using this technology and any other mobile marketing approach will depend entirely on how the campaign is combined with other traditional media channels and what content, useful services and value you are providing to the users.

Kick-off

abarmat@gmail.com (Ariel Barmat) — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 22:01:00 +0000

It took more time than we expected but here we are with our first post. We planned to write a blog as one of the first things in our startup but it seems there were many other first things before this one.

For all of you to know, Beepoint is a mobile software development house that creates innovative solutions to reduce the gap between mobile users and the information and services on the Internet. Finished the formal stuff, our mantra is to bring openness to the mobile world. It doesn’t mean that we are going to pay everyone’s phone bills but we are constantly looking for new ways for people to enjoy their mobile experience at just one click distance.

In this blog we will post our vision about the mobile (r)evolution as well as any other interesting stuff that we might come up on the blogosphere.

See you on the next post.

Cheers!