"São Paulo alone has 18 million people," says Eyemagnet Director Paul Treacy. "They will be able to receive information, discounts and other offers while travelling on any of the city's 35,000 buses."
Eyemagnet, a screen technology and infrastructure company, is licensing its solutions to Caio Industries, which builds and supplies buses across South America. On its new, bio-diesel fleet of buses, Caio is already installing the advertising and information display screens - managed and controlled over the Brazilian mobile phone network.
BusTV is delivered as a store and forward technology, synchronizing promotional data with central servers using the mobile data network. It displays content on specific bus routes and at a specific time. The system also utilizes SMS for customers to interact with individual screens. The passenger sends a short code by text message to the number on the ad on the display screen and receives, for example, a voucher, a bar code or an image to be redeemed or used in places such as retail stores, super markets or theaters. For now, the ads are unique to the scheduled route of a particular bus. The next step is to use GPS to localize and customize the content even further.
"Say someone gets off a bus next to a shoe store everyday. We would be able to display ads from that store in time for the passenger to send a text message and receive a voucher for that store before it's time to get off," Treacy says.
Eyemagnet has confirmed connectivity, through its Brazilian SMS partner Cyclelogic, to all of the South American mobile operators. Bus passengers do not have to sign up for the service, which will continue to be based on text messaging. The only limit, Treacy explains, is what the mobile handset can do.
In 2006, Eyemagnet won the Ericsson Frontier Award in New Zealand. The competition is a way for Ericsson Mobility World to invite pioneering developers to submit innovative applications or content. And Eyemagnet met its distributor in Brazil via an introduction by Ericsson Mobility World.
"Eyemagnet has been involved with Ericsson from an early stage, and Ericsson has recognized Eyemagnet's value proposition and been very supportive, continuing to introduce us to various potential partners globally," Treacy says. "Ericsson is synonymous with innovation, and Eyemagnet is an innovative company - we are absolutely aligned with Ericsson's position."
The main purposes of Ericsson Mobility World is to drive creation and deployment of mobile services for the future and to use Ericsson's experience and expertise to link key players in the industry. So is BusTV an example of this and, above all, is this convergence of screens and content happening before the consumers eyes?
"Yes, this is pure innovation," says Alexandre Goldman, marketing specialist at Ericsson Mobility World Brazil. "As an active player in multimedia, Ericsson is driving new media services and interactivity. We support innovative companies like Eyemagnet to identify, verify and market new applications all over the world with Ericsson Mobility World's global reach."
