One night, while studying for his doctorate in quantum physics at Cambridge University some twenty years ago, Fabien Beckers had a chance encounter with a blind person that would change his life. “She was lost and had misplaced her luggage,” he recalls. “All she had to get around was a white blind stick. I couldn’t believe this was how she made her way in the world.”

For the next five years, Beckers threw himself into solving her problem by developing a new cane for the blind equipped with a “joystick” synched to a primitive RFID chip to read locative data. Eventually Beckers let go of the project—“I couldn’t see it being viable, and no one has money for the blind,” he says—but the idea of wirelessly conveying essential consumer information stuck, and now Becker’s company Kameleon Technologies is a leader in Bluetooth-enabled “social marketing.”

Mobizone, Kameleon’s core product, is a Bluetooth-enabled billboard system that lets anyone with a switched-on Bluetooth device (mobile phones, PDAs, PCs, etc.) grab data on-the-go. Just a little less exciting than Tom Cruise’s experience of personalized advertising in Mission Impossible, there’s little doubt location-based promos-to-mobiles will be a big hit one day. Kameleon already has at least three competitors (WideRay, FilterUK, and Hypertag), and systems like Mobizone are already in wide use across Asia and Europe, where consumers can get videos, coupons, animations, music, still images, and all manner of promotional interactivity over their phones. Indeed, Mobizone recently had a trial in New York’s Grand Central Station where some 4,000 passersby (of 40,000 switched-on strollers) grabbed previews of new fall TV shows on CBS. No wonder Beckers believes his industry will hit the 50 billion Euro mark in revenues within five years.

“Bluetooth advertising really works,” he says from Kameleon’s Paris base. “Most people who walk by a billboard usually get just 10 percent of what’s there and then retain just 10 percent of that. But when someone passes by a Mobizone it changes the whole game. Now you have to make the message strong enough to get people interact with it. And once they do, you know you’ve got your customer. If he is interested enough to download just a piece, he’ll certainly remember it, and get the rest later. Leaving your brand on someone’s phone is the most powerful media you can get. It’s hugely powerful.”

It may even be powerful enough to help the blind. Last year, Kameleon equipped a Metro station in Paris with Mobizone technology, giving thirty visually disabled people Bluetooth-equipped mobile phones to guide them through the station. Of course, there’s no telling whether they ultimately preferred the location data over the advertising, but the experience was undoubtedly better than navigating by a long white cane.
—Craig Bromberg

www.kameleon-media.com

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