Two new products launched

This week Hypertag has launched two more products – what we are calling Hypertag Standalone Lite and Hypertag Standalone Professional. These are significant because with them we now believe we can offer customers a product line up to meet just about every need we see. More on that below.

I thought at this juncture, it might be useful for me to give a more general overview on the full range of what we now offer.

For a small company, Hypertag spans a wide range of markets and customers, and because of that I am always conscious that many may be unaware of the full range of what we do. Hopefully, this concise overview will help and you may find something of interest you may not have been aware of.

What do we help customers with?

Hypertag’s work tends to focus around the following customer objectives:

1. Increasing sales – often involving our technology delivering vouchers of one form or another to people’s phones. We have proven success in this, for example 38% + higher sales when Hypertag is used.Request the case study.
2. Increasing footfall – here we often use vouchers or calendar reminders to drive people into retail stores or onto websites. Often we use competition mechanics to achieve the best results e.g. 10% higher footfall. Request the case study.
3. Building loyalty – repeat visits. How can you incentivise a customer to come back time and time again, and turn your location into a destination. Request the case study.
4. Launches – be it a promotional offer or a new product launch, our customers like to use Hypertag to put a reminder onto consumers’ mobile phones. This form of content is particularly viral. Request the case study.
5. Drive to web – we have expertise in understanding what kind of content download motivates consumers to go on and visit a website. Request the case study.
6. Data acquisition – through our partnership with Insight NOW, we can offer real time surveying technology that also helps you gain data. Request the case study.
7. Brand awareness – also known as Brand Activation. We have experience of over 500 campaigns activating brand objectives, and can talk you through many case studies. Request an example case study.
8. Helping visitors interpret their environment – quite a departure from the other objectives above, but we have particular expertise in interpretation for Heritage and  Arts organisations through mobile devices, and have run over 20 of these such projects both in the UK and overseas since 2002. Request some examples.

What products do we sell?

Hypertag often combines different products and services to meet individual customer requirements, but the full list of products we sell is as follows:

Hypertag Standalone Lite – this is our entry level Proximity Marketing device which offers the ability to programme the unit with simple content and review usage. The tag is updated with new content and usage is downloaded via a USB Flash drive. The product is priced at £599. You pay a one off fee, and then you can update the databases so it stays current for the latest phones by purchasing upgrades separately. This product is aimed at small business owners who may want to increase the number of customers coming into their store, or customers with straightforward content needs. Request more info.

Hypertag Standalone Professional – this is a more fully featured product. It offers customers the ability to send a wider range of content, and review usage in far more detail revealing the full detail of our renowned usage monitoring system – Hyperhub^TM. This product is priced as a simple one off fee at £799, but you can also buy upgrades as with the Lite product. This product is aimed at customers who want a more fully featured Proximity Marketing system but don’t need a constant connection to the tag and don’t want to pay an ongoing regular fee. Request more info.

Hypertag Wearable Professional – this is perhaps our best known product. We were the first company to develop a portable and wearable version of Proximity Marketing technology, and six years on, the formula hasn’t had to change much. A bright red light to draw attention from a long distance, the full range of content mechanics, the detailed usage analysis, the light weight design and superior battery life really make it the ideal product for short term promo staff lead activations. We can either rent the units out or sell them to customers who plan to use them over an extended period. We can either put together the content for the campaigns, or give you access to the tools to do the content yourself. Request more info.

Hypertag Network Professional – this is our core product for customers needing a constant network connection to the unit, and it can be fully controlled via any web interface. It is ideal for people who manage multiple locations and do not want to visit the tag. Permission Management is useful if there are multiple stakeholders needing different levels of access to the product e.g. a Marketing Director, a central marketing department and a local store manager. This product is kept up to date permanently, and customers benefit from free and ongoing software upgrades, new features and up to date handset databases. The product can be connected back to the internet via either an Ethernet cable or a GPRS (over the air) modem. The product is priced from £309 and there is a regular ongoing monthly fee from £19 per tag per month depending on the volume of tags in your network and the length of your contract with us. Request more info.

Magus – this is one of our Heritage Products. It is essentially a video guide. Taking the traditional audio guide that you may have used walking around a museum or gallery, and adding multimedia content and advanced features such as quizzes, an e-mail link after the visit to the content you accessed whilst at the museum and even the ability for you to vote with your video guide. Hypertag can offer consultancy on how best to implement such a system, the devices themselves, charging racks, the software to run on the devices, the content for the device, and support for the duration of the installation. We have installed over 15 such projects worldwide since 2002. Request more info.

Mentor – this is our product name for offering interpretation information via mobile phones. We twin the core Hypertag products above with either audio, visual or Java applications to offer varying degrees of detail. We have run over 10 of these projects in the UK, and have projects currently underway with Norwich Heart, Natural England and the National Trust. Request more info.

Bluetooth networks

We have been working hard on establishing Proximity Marketing networks in good quality and high dwell time locations. Tags are installed in locations, and advertisers or their agencies are able to book time on the devices for content to be downloaded to mobile phones. Our aim is to establish these networks ourselves or to partner with other quality providers we know well and trust. Today, we can offer you space in the following locations:

• Airports
• Train Stations
• Buses
• Shopping Centres
• Bars

Different locations have different charging arrangements, but on a cost per download basis, all locations compare well with digital advertising benchmarks. We can help you decide which locations to focus on for any particular campaign you like to run. Request more info.

What else do we do?

Many people think of us as a provider of products. We can also book space on established Proximity advertising networks such as those above. In fact, we often get involved at the very start of campaigns helping define the objectives, coming up with novel creative concepts through to the full implementation cycle.

We can create mobile content, we can edit mobile content, we can create posters for campaigns. We also source promotional staff who are highly trained in working with our wearable Hypertags. We can source advertising displays and posters.

By virtue of the complexity of the technology we build in house, we also have a highly experienced and very able technical team. We do consultancy projects for clients, including building bespoke software that many mobile marketing companies would be unable to do. Recent projects have included a visitor information treasure hunt for the Royal Institution of Great Britain, a prize draw safe for O2 for their sales conferences, and a project looking a new ways of helping blind people find their way around city centres by mobile phone.

We work with each customer to varying degrees. Some just want to purchase one of our products and they can do the rest. Others want us to manage whole networks of tags on their behalf. Others even outsource their support calls to us. We can always tailor our support and services around whatever it is you are looking to achieve.

How to keep in touch?

Firstly, we have a monthly newsletter. You can also follow our blog, our You Tube channel, or my Twitter account. If you would like us to come in and brief you or your company more fully, please click here. If you would like one of us to give you a regular call to keep in touch personally, and bring you up to date with the latest news, please click here. We are bringing our website up to date again to hopefully make it easier for you to access the information you need quickly, and to provide you with far more resources to save you time and energy. If you have any particular requests or suggestions, please get in touch.

On behalf of the whole team at Hypertag, I look forward to working with you all in the months to come.

Jonathan Morgan

Hypertag at the Mobile World Congress

Hypertag was at Mobile World Congress between 14th – 18th February 2010.

Jonathan Morgan on Sky’s ‘Technology Unplugged show report (in the final minute of the video).

We met lots of potential customers who we will be following up with over the next few days.

Two highlights we wanted to share were the fabulous promo staff, Amanda, Christiane and Ulrike (picture below) who wore our Wearable Hypertags on the main Avenida which downloaded content to drive people into our stand at AV26, and Lord Davies, UK Minister for Trade, who was so taken by the Wearable Hypertag he wanted to wear one for himself (picture on the right).

Mashable data

Whilst I was at the Entrepreneur Country event last week, I heard a talk from Stephan Shakespeare, strategy director, of YouGov. Among many interesting points that he made, particularly around the widening debate of transparency in government, he brought up the concept of mashable data. That is data that can be analysed by a third party and manipulated in various ways to identify trends or patterns. For example, the great retired population in the UK is now manipulating publicly available data they find on the web to highlight issues and provide oversight of government functions that reduce cost and improve efficiency.

It occurred to me that this was one of the key benefits of using Hypertag. That is, that at the end of every campaign our customers get an excel spreadsheet that has all the raw data on it, that can be manipulated, graphed, analysed and manipulated as the user wishes. This approach of mashing data has been used by us internally for years as we have used it to bring context to campaigns for our clients and as we have compared them to other campaigns to help clients benchmark. Increasingly, as we are doing campaigns that gain greater and greater usage, the amount of data is increasing exponentially and therefore our clients have an even larger sample size to review. Clients are already using this to spot issues that can directly impact business decisions positively on a day to day basis – what products to push, when to push them, why certain products sell better than others etc.

Furthermore, as more clients choose to combine our core Proximity system with surveying, the value of that data is increasing in its value and depth.

For more information on what data can be produced and is readily available for our clients, get in touch.

Jonathan Morgan

p.s.

Following on from my blog on mashable data, I read with interest about Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the internet, launching www.data.gov.uk just today as part of this trend to making data more transparent, and allowing third parties to mash that data as they see fit.

I am sure Hypertag will follow the same sort of approach in the future and allow third parties to write applications to mash the data themselves.

Free proximity marketing campaigns!

For a number of selected brands in 2010, Hypertag is offering the opportunity to run Proximity Marketing Campaigns at no charge to selected customers. This is part of a major project aiming to bring the next generation Global Proximity Marketing System to the market that fully meet the future marketing needs of companies worldwide.

Hypertag, along with its partners JC Decaux, PSI Advertising and others, has been working on bringing this innovative solution to market for the last 18 months. Evaluation stage market trials have now begun with several major brands that include CNN and Burger King as the system is finely tuned to further meet the needs of brands and agencies alike.

Hypertag is now looking for more global brands who wish to participate in these trials over the course of 2010. If selected, you will have exclusive access to this new accountable and interactive advertising service, which has already enjoyed proven success in raising sales and footfall. Most importantly, the selected brands will be able to influence future service development to meet their specific needs.

If you are interested in being considered as a trial partner, please contact Jonathan Morgan as soon as possible!

Jonathan Morgan

Director

Minimising total cost of ownership

Total cost of ownership (TCO). I’ve been reading about lots of companies saying they help with this. E.g. Enqii, who supply digital screen management systems to customers like CBS, JC Decaux and McDonalds.

Minimising TCO for Proximity Marketing providers is exactly what we do. Basically total cost of ownership is based on working out all the costs over the life cycle of using the product. So although you might find a cheaper product to buy or a product without an ongoing fee; for example, in our world lots of companies offer ‘unlimited licenses’ – a subject I have covered before, a product with the lowest total cost of ownership is the one which at the end of the year or the project ended up costing you less.

So can it end up costing you less? Well the real cost in my experience is in poor reliability (and having to visit equipment), or in not having content flexible enough to meet the requirements of customers (losing out on sales opportunities), or in achieving fewer downloads which always disappoints clients (lower return on investment).

Our technology is designed for maximum reliability so that when you install it, you don’t have to visit it ever again. It’s designed with maximum content flexibility so that you can support whatever campaigns your clients throw at you, and it features “download priority” which we believe is different to other Proximity Providers out there. Namely, we prioritise downloading content to the customer before we move onto serve another user. Most providers we know of prioritise pick up which means you get the message on your phone offering you the content, but because their box is so busy sending those messages to as many phones as possible, there’s not the bandwidth to deliver the actual content quickly. In our experience slow downloads lead to more user cancelling the download or walking off which is turn leads to fewer downloads for the client. Download Priority maximises usage and therefore client’s return on investment (ROI).

As we enter 2010, we will be launching more variants of our products, bringing the benefits of our Enterprise Grade technology and philosophy of minimising TCO at lower price points. If you want a quality solution that costs you less, give us a call.

Jonathan

Getting apps to phones

Applications for phones or Java apps, particularly in the form of games, have been around for years. More recently though, particularly boosted by Apple’s marketing efforts, applications have become all the rage. I believe Apple have had over 2 billion of their apps downloaded since they launched the App Store 18 months ago!

The question we have been thinking about is how to get the app to the phone? Some platforms, like Apple, have very well publicised systems for distributing these apps. For example, Apple has the App Store, where you can browse through 10s of thousands of apps to find one you like. If you know the app, or part of the name, this works fairly well as a result of the search function. If you know the category of app, for example music or entertainment, there is a menu structure which helps to some degree. However, it’s still a fairly involved process. Other ‘competing’ systems involve GetJar which works on Java phones and follows similar principles.

Over at Hypertag, we have been thinking about how you get one of these apps on your phones when you need it, i.e. when you are doing something. The benefit of focusing on when you are doing something is that you tend to be somewhere e.g. I am catching a plane, therefore I’m at an airport, or I’m looking for some trainers, so I might be in a shop. It is here we see a straong application for Proximity technology. We have the perfect technology to link a visual stimulus, e.g. I want that app that helps me choose which trainers are right for me, or that app that helps me ensure I catch my flight on time, and the ability for you to receive it immediately and for free e.g. in the sports store, or at the airport. We can do this with the vast majority of Java apps (which themselves cover about 80% of phones), and we are working hard to bring a product to market for iPhone apps.

We are starting to work with some of the big brands on using this technology to get their content to consumers more quickly. If you have an app, and want to get it out there, we’re interested in talking to you.

Jonathan Morgan

21 Bluetooth Connection Proximity Marketing

Proximity or Bluetooth Marketing suppliers face many challenges in delivering solutions that meet consumer demand for instant access to rich content on their mobile devices. Currently most Proximity Marketing systems use Bluetooth as their primary technology to deliver content, so one of the biggest challenges is servicing a large number of consumers quickly with high quality content using a relatively low bandwidth wireless technology.

It has become an industry standard to supply Proximity Marketing servers with 3 Bluetooth radios fitted, any more and you run the risk of radio interference, any less and the system may not have sufficient bandwidth to service the number of consumers wanting content. Bluetooth technology supports up to 7 simultaneous connections per Bluetooth radio, therefore if you have a Proximity Marketing server with 3 radios you should in theory be able to service 21 simultaneous connections, and if you listen to the hype this is what you would expect in practise also.

However, if we look at the analogy of Internet connectivity, we can identify some issues. During low-usage times of the day the Internet will be very responsive and users can download large amounts of data very quickly. However when the number of users goes up you will experience severe degradation of the service and downloads that earlier were very quick are now seemingly very slow. This is caused by limited bandwidth on the Internet connection that everyone is sharing.

The same potential effect exists when downloading content using Bluetooth, so if one consumer is connected to a Proximity Marketing server they will likely experience a quick download, however as the number of connections goes up the download speeds will be significantly reduced due to the limited bandwidth. To put this into perspective, it is expected that with one connection per Bluetooth radio a 500kB video could be downloaded in 30 seconds, if the download takes any longer consumers gets impatient. If more connections are allowed more consumers will be serviced simultaneously, but the download time will drop significantly leading to a bad experience.

It is also worth noting that many mobile phones do not provide a progress bar, (Nokia is one such example) so there is no indication of how much of the download has been completed. Therefore if the download is very slow many consumers will have no idea what is going on, which may result in them giving up.

In understanding the limitations of Bluetooth technology, mobile phones, and consumer experience, Hypertag’s products support 3 simultaneous connections per unit, prioritising download speed rather than number of simultaneous connections. With over 3 years experience of deploying our wearable Hypertags in high load festival and event situations, these units deliver again and again in the toughest of load environments proving this strategy delivers results.

Hypertag’s next generation platform, which will be beta trialling in Q2 2010, includes unique enhancements to better utilise the number of Bluetooth connections without impacting on perceivable download performance. Further details of this system will be available next year.

Breaking through

I read this article about Icon Mobile who are doing some interesting things in mobile.

I can’t agree enough with what Thomas Fellger, their CEO, has said about how mobile can really drive results when it plays to its strengths; content linked to your location, what you are doing, and your connectivity with peers. We have also seen very strong results with clients where these attributes are really exploited.

We’re planning to bring out a series of articles highlighting these successes with clients’ permission over the next few weeks. We have started with the work we are doing with McArthur Glen, where we are driving 30% of footfall into their centres.

Hopefully, if enough of us from the industry can start banging the drum about what can really be achieved, brands will start to see that when they use trusted technology providers like Icon and Hypertag, it really can achieve knock out results.

Jonathan

2014: A Media Odyssey – a view

I read with interest Suzy Bashford’s article titled “2014: A Media Odyssey“ in Media Week on the future of advertising. In particular, I was interested to see the comments on mobile.

Location-sensitive information, alongside a constant connection to the internet, will revolutionise mobile media.” Of course, here at Hypertag we couldn’t agree more. Having pioneered location based technologies such as Bluetooth Marketing that can actually deliver content related to your pin point location for eight years, we feel well placed to both see the potential and the culmination of eight years’ experience means we now have the technology to be able to really deliver.

With our long standing partners, using Proximity or Bluetooth Marketing, we are delivering location based internet services today at an ever expanding rate. Those who have permanent networks with us know all about the business success we deliver to them, 20% – 40% of people going on to use internet services when linked to their physical location is commonplace nowadays.

Faster and cheaper over the air (OTA) technologies will only widen the number of applications we can deliver to people at the point of need. If you want to fast forward to 2014 today, give us a call.

Picture credit: Brand Republic

Jonathan Morgan

WPP – Sir Martin Sorrell on the BBC News

I was listening to the BBC News this morning and on came Sir Martin Sorrell, the “bell weather” of the advertising industry. Although his profits were down, he came on to explain that he thought the key issues going forward were;

1. New Media – digital; which he says already make up 26% of his £13Bn revenues;
2. New Markets – BRIC (Brazil, India, Russia and China) plus the next 11 – which were basically other Asia, Latin America, Africa and Mid East countries;
3. Consumer Insight – understanding how consumer behaviours are changing

Here at Hypertag we’re delighted as with our Proximity and Bluetooth Marketing channel we can hit digital marketing objectives on a number of fronts; download to mobile, upload from mobile, temporary digital campaigns, mobile digital campaigns and even larger networks.

Furthermore, consumer insight is really gaining a pace. Not only do we feel we have class leading reporting and benchmarking systems. But because we collate all our data from every campaign ever run centrally, all our customers can learn from each other (respecting client confidentiality) and the consumer insight benefits all. With some of our largest clients we are now linking the behaviour at the point of the Proximity transaction to the rest of the value chain to identify how we can tweak mechanics to increase sales for customers.

Lastly, with specific initiatives like our Survey Dispenser, we can put the Hypertag technology together with real-time surveying from our partners at InsightNOW to help brands adjust their offering in real time.

Exciting times for the industry and for us!

Jonathan Morgan

Picture credit: WPP