adAlive
adAlive Public Wireless Portal
√ CityGuide
√ HotSync
The Need?
Viral marketing: Public wireless access with a creative ad tie-in
AdAlive was formed to develop and deploy wireless internet portals for free public access in high-traffic areas such as airports, hotels, and trade show venues.
Their creative marketing concept? Associate these free portals with large advertising signs, and offer the user information about the advertised product on a strictly managed opt-in basis. Users are encouraged to share the AdAlive application and content freely.
Extensive up-to-date CityGuide information provides users with valuable content.
The Goal?
Make the “sophisticated” sell easy on the user.
The user is provided with free adAlive portal software which could be downloaded from any of their public portals with a single-button “push to start” simplicity. Once downloaded, a software installer (developed by Green Mountain) interacted with the user and the wireless access point via IR to give the user access to free CityGuide content and email tools.
Ad content is concise and users & only view ads they choose to see.
The Solution?
A solid architecture to handle multiple mobile devices & make the communication flawless.
Green Mountain developed the handheld installer, plus the adAlive Portal application for PDAs. We also were heavily involved in developing the application-layer protocols used for communication between the wireless access point and the handheld software. A great deal of careful engineering and thorough testing was required to support a broad range of consumer devices, each of which presented myriad compatibility challenges.
Users pre-select options for their next flight connection to an AdAlive access point.
Individual IR access points located throughout an airline terminal communicated via Wi-Fi with a site server, which cached information obtained from adAlive global servers. The CityGuide information, licensed from 10Best, updates automatically daily using software developed by Green Mountain to efficiently convert XML documents into a compressed database format for download and storage on the user’s PDA.
An AdAlive-provided free email application enables users to check their mail on the run between flights.
Ad content, similarly updated and cached at the site level, is unobtrusively delivered to the user, who can view it on demand, and if they wish, request follow-up information to be delivered via email.
Platforms
√ Palm OS
√ PocketPC
√ Windows 2000 Server
√ Embedded Linux
Components
√ PDA Portal Application
√ PDA CityGuide Browser
√ PDA eMail Application
√ CityGuide Content Converter
√ IrDA Application Protocol
√ Embedded Linux Access Point
√ Site Servers
√ Global Servers
