Tomato Sauce Marketing

Early this morning I cracked open this weeks economist - ok in truth I opened my iPod download from this weeks Economist (available at about midnight EST every Thursday on http://talkingissues.economist.com/ a brilliant 5 star service). Anyway, the obvious article and series of special reports where titled - A Wireless World - Our Nomadic Future. Of course if you read my blog you I know I have a keen interest in Wifi technologies as it pertains to marketing.

I am not going to go into the article in much detail, except to list the important points from my perspective;

• mobile phones and hand holds are becoming prevalent
• wireless hot spots are rapidly increasing (most of them locked)
• there are dramatic changes in office habits, traffic patterns, work methods because of these connectivity solutions
• consumers will interact with web sites using many different technologies, from text messaging to Blackberries

There is little question that wireless communications will become the dominant method of communicating and inferring presence and location (probably even big brother). The big players including Google are determined to own the cell network space, however the local Wifi spectrum is pretty much a free for all.

My earlier piece discusses the concept of marketing beacons. Simple technology really, and readily available. Once again its not the technology that is a challenge, but rather how it will be used for effective marketing. How it will be used to stay connected with customers for a lifetime.

In this article I am briefly going to describe how to build a beacon device. These can be used in restaurants, retails outlets, hotels, hospitals, etc. They can effectively beam out information and at the same time allow visitors the ability to ‘hop on the network’. Perhaps a trade, your email registration for some information and then freedom to use my network.

Do you remember the days when hotels displayed “no vacancies”, or restaurants handed out a menu, or a retail store pasted a for sale sign on the window? Or those days in a bar, or conference room, or lobby where you had no idea you where sitting alongside someone with the same interest in Formula One racing. Or receiving a mash-up on your mobile device merging theater times with local diners.

Well no more.

So how do you build a beacon device. Easy (if you need more information, visit the about page and drop me a note) if you have some ‘nerdish’ tendencies.

There are two fairly mature open source solutions that I am aware of.

The first is Coova.org which has all the firmware for building and maintaining a hot spot. It provides authentication services, captive portal which is enforced until authentication, authorization, Radius accounting, OpenVPN, and most importantly location aware delivery of content! This later piece is based on Wifidog which is a next generation alternative for NoCat.

Now the firmware can be placed directly on a Linksys router, however you need to be careful which version you select. Some Linksys routers are built with Linux and are open source, some later versions use VxWorks and have less memory. I opted for the WRT54GL (review below) which does not have version issues. I will describe my installation adventures in another blog.

The second device of interest is built around similar open source software from CUWin again using many open source components. In particular the CUWin kit from Metrix Communications looks excellent. It specifically focuses on outdoor use. I will review this also in a later post.

Below s a short review on the Linksys WRT54GL