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You'll Like This. Or Not.

Visitors to Pretoria Airport are greeted by signs pointing them to turn on their mobile phone's Bluetooth connectivity. Accepting the connection results in an animated GIF being sent to the phone - with special offers on duty free products.

In our (naturally wonderful) wireless world the process of discovery, knowing what services are currently available in proximity is far from painless. Whilst I rarely buy duty free I suspect that most people would find the 'special offer' underwhelming given the steps required to receive (even if connectivity was switched on) and the risks associated with accepting gifts from strangers.

Purveyors of location based services may be interested in the 2003 NTT DoCoMo's comprehensive R-Click trial in Tokyo's Roppongi Hills. By signing up to R-Click and completing a profile of interests participants were offered three services: location based advertising according to personal preferences (Koko Dake Click); information based on what was shown on LCD displays (Mite Toru Click) for example a url related to the advertising that was displayed when you were present is sent to your i-Mode equipped phone; and finally a services that monitored where the participant was going and tried to predict what offers or items of interest they would want mailed to their phone (Buratto). In other words the system tracks your every move (not dis-similar to CCTV) except that this information can be cross checked with your profile, your mobile phone, and to the profile that the system builds around your behaviours. To be fair R-Click was a trial and trials are there to, well, try out stuff. And yes, its opt-in. But the approach in the R-Click trial, in particular the Buratto service highlights a fundamental assumption about privacy, or lack of - you are there to be tracked, sold to, and you pay for the priviledge because i-mode is a pay-per-packet service.

How well did the Roppongi Hill R-click service work? From my own experience, even with my profile of interests and knowing where I was heading it was unable to provide relevant recommendations and in many ways it highlighted the challenge of providing the right person with the right information at the right time. Getting it even marginally wrong results in an unwanted intrusion.

Would I accept future special offers at Pretoria Airport? Only out of boredom. But Airports are far from boring - there are simply too many interesting people to observe.

Bootnote: Can you build a service based on killing boredom? Undoubtedly.Who is motivated by what reasons to create boredom scenarios? Cue delayed flights, trains, busses...

Writing from Tokyo | August 17, 2006 | Permalink