OpenProximity Home Page
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Welcome to the OpenProximity Community Wiki

OpenProximity™ is an open source implementation of a commercial grade Bluetooth® Proximity Marketing system. The development of this project has been sponsored since November 2007 by Wireless Cables Inc., the manufacturer of the only patented Long Range Bluetooth radio that can communicate to cell phones at a 10 times greater range.

But what is Proximity Marketing?

Well the name says it all. Marketing, or communicating relevant information, to something or someone that is near you. Basically you have a Bluetooth host that is continuously inquiring for new targets. And when it finds one the host sends an image, a java game, a ringtone, a brochure, etc. even URL to reference web pages.


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EXAMPLE » Train Station Schedules: Suppose you are near a train station, and you want to know which trains are getting there in the next 30 minutes and where they go. Instead of asking someone or going into the station looking for a sign with a schedule, you just put your Bluetooth cell phone in visible mode, and voilà you get the train schedule.


Of course there are a lot more of uses for this functionality like sending gift cards to customer at a restaurant, giving free ring tones at a rock concert, etc.

As you can image possibilities are as vast as your imagination.

Creative Applications Including Ways to Generate Revenue

A short range setting is an area or application with a small number of simultaneous connections in close proximity to to the source.

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Examples:

  • Provide retail coupons to local stores in a mall.
  • Provide information on paintings in a museum as you pass in front of it.
  • Provide instant coupons for coffee as you park near a coffee house.
  • Announce a special at the concession stands at a base ball/football game.
  • Provide relevant information on bus and train schedules at their respective stations.
  • Send URLs to encourage web browsing which generates revenue to cell phone providers as well as potential revenue to those corresponding web sites.

Click here for a list of features: Features

Community

We welcome the community of developers to contribute to this wiki.
Please share your experience, help others to get started. What is your best way to reach customers?

The source code is maintained on Google Code. The binaries are available on Ubuntu.

Extending the Range

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Regular Bluetooth devices are limited in range to 10m which means that as people walk through a designated area, the Bluetooth host will locate a moving “target” but there will be limited time to send relevant marketing information to that target before the target disappears. A way to avoid this problem is to extend the range of the Bluetooth host from 10m to hundreds of meters. The AIRcable Host XR2 will greatly extend the range allowing more time to deliver your marketing campaign to relevant subjects.

An AIRcable Host XR2 is required to use as an uploader for files in OpenProximity.
We only ask that you do not post how to remove the AIRcable blocking code, to allow continuing funding of this project.

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License