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BT rolls out new ad-heavy payphones
It looks like the streets of London will soon be getting an extra dash of advertising courtesy of BT, which has begun the roll-out of some fresh new payphones, marking the first redesign the company's done in more than 20 years. Designed in partnership with advertising firm JCDecaux, the so-called Street Talk 6 kiosks boast illuminated scrolling advertisements on the rear and no walls or doors, with only a small plastic hood provided to protect the cellphone-less among you from the elements. Apparently, the payphone's cost BT about £2,000 (or close to $4,000) apiece, although we somehow doubt they'll have much trouble making that back a few times over. Look for the first of the new payphones to hit the Richmond and Ealing boroughs of London this week, with the roll-out presumably set to slowly expand throughout the rest of the U.K. shortly thereafter.[Via Channel 4]
Parisian billboards enabled for interactive advertising
In what may be the first step towards a possible "nightmare scenario" where you can't walk around an urban area without your phone being deluged with spam, a French advertising firm has installed small transmitters on billboards and posters around Paris that offer downloads or discounts to passersby. Luckily the Bluetooth-based system being deployed by JCDecaux is strictly opt-in, meaning only those mobile users who want the swag-on-the-go will be bothered, and they can further limit intrusions by choosing to just receive ads about topics that interest them. Ironically, this commercial endeavor evolved out of a project by France's National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control to provide assistance for the disabled, but the project was scrapped and JCDecaux purchased the exclusive license for the underlying technology. The same team that worked on the government research is also developing another innovative fusion of advertising and cellphone, in the form of billboards called UbiBoards that change their displays based on characteristics of the majority of the people in the vicinity by pulling demographic data from their handsets.[Via textually, picture courtesy of Kameleon]
