The UK Mobile Report

Opinion: Craig Massey, Glass Partnership

Craig Massey sees a world in which adverts talk to you and communicate via Bluetooth. In fact it's already here....

Picture this.

You grab ten minutes of relative calm with a mid-morning cappuccino while your other half battles it out in the heaving shopping mall. Suddenly you spot a futuristic looking ‘pod’ with plasma screen.

 

On screen appears dynamic footage of the new Audi TTS roadster. Just then an attractive avatar pops up speaking directly to you.  She prompts you to take out your phone and switch on Bluetooth.

You think 'why not?' and switch it on. 

 

A connection is made with Audi and a form is sent to your handset requesting: Name, Postcode, Mobile Number and preferred Date of Test Drive. Baffled, you enter the information and press send.

 

Within seconds the name of your nearest dealer is Bluetoothed back to your mobile, together with a choice of times to book a test drive. You click on the desired time and press send.

 

A full colour digital invitation card is sent to your handset with the dealer contact details, the agreed times and promises to send reminder text messages.

 

All this, before you’ve had chance to tuck into your pain-au-chocolate, and it hasn’t cost a single penny in network charges.

Science Fiction? Well actually no.

 

At the British International Motor Show, ExCel, in London in July, we will see pioneering use of Bluetooth ‘Digital Download Stations’ (DDS). Each station can simultaneously interact with up to 53 mobiles and will be used by vehicle manufactures to provide exclusive mobile content free of charge including video clips, wallpapers, pod casts and audio files.

 

When sited in busy areas, these stations are ideal for providing free entertaining content to keep visitors amused. And as they are all controlled from a web-based system, they can be simultaneously switched to broadcast specific show announcements.

 

At major venues like this - around 800 events a year, 60,000 exhibitors and up to 15 million visitors - Bluetooth is a great way to offer one-to-one interaction and information that users genuinely want without the expense of sales people.

 

Craig Massey, Head of Mobile, Glass Partnership

craig.massey@glasspartnership.co.uk

www.glasspartnership.co.uk

The 'A' word closes down Techcrunch

Few things make people sit up and listen as much as a good row and a sacking. When I started this site I mentioned that I was scanning for other great sites and I gave a mention to Sam Sethi on TechCrunch UK (I should have also mentioned the excellent Mike Butcher).

But now Sam has been sacked and the UK site closed.

All due to a row over a posting that Sam made slagging off elements of the LeWeb 3 conference in France - comments echoed by many other bloggers.

Le Web 3 conference organiser Loic Lemur read Sam's post and, shock horror, wrote a comment calling Sethi an asshole. A reply followed etc......and then TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington sacked Sam for not taking his post down. In support of Sam, Mike Butcher has resigned - detailing his reasons on his own blog.

On the one hand this is all good fun. On the other hand two people who were doing great stuff have lost their jobs (for the moment at least) over a matter of freedom of speech. Expect massive support for Sam and Mike. There is nothing like free speech to bring out the angry blogger in all of us.  But Michael Arrington has summed up the situation on the Crunchnotes blog suggesting that ultimately Sethi fired himself before a U-turn could have been engineered.

A timeline of this whole sorry spat is given on Digital Lifestyles. If you read it carefully you will detect there were other issues at play - namely that Arrington was a partner (sponsor?) of Le Web 3 and that Sethi is organising events that Arrington wasn't aware of. Could this be a case of extra-curricular activity bringing down an editor (not uncommon) made worse by the fact that Arrington felt that Sethi had an axe to grind because his upcoming conference activity was in direct competition to Le Web?

Asshole, it seems, is quite a useful word if you want to flush things out in the open. Maybe that's why we use it?

By the way, this photo of Sam is circa 1990 something - he's not a young graduate anymore folks.

Steve Wozniak

Just been listening to Steve Wozniak (co-founder of Apple) being interviewed on Radio 5 by Simon Mayo. What an interesting man. I didn't realise he went back to get a degree and then teach teenagers after he shifted away from having a central role at Apple. He is refreshingly anti technology in some ways too. When Simon Mayo suggested the home of the future would be run by a central computer (Microsoft PR must have been smiling) Wozniak said he preferred to pass on that option: "I prefer a dial on the wall for the heating, some things we don't need computers for."