SaM Solutions developed a platform consisting of a backend and client applications for proactive, LBS/location-based marketing and advertising that allow users and 3rd party providers to easily create, maintain and offer their services to users of the platform. The users can easily find and subscribe to the services they are interested in. The 3rd parties can define their own location based commercial services for advertising for which they have to pay basing on the usage of these services. These services may include location-based services advertising or couponing based on usage and popularity of the geographic location.
The Location as a Service platform offers basic services to the users that are automatically subscribed or available on the client. Those services include requesting if a user is currently residing in his/her home location and to proactively notify other users when the user is entering or leaving one of his/her locations. Another basic service is the capability to create temporal locations valid for a limited period of time. Subscribers are also supplied with a virtual notifier for invited friends. Advertisers are enabled to provide virtual vouchers for subscribers of the service. The subscribers are shown a voucher in their mobile application (linked to the website of the advertiser) when they enter a location (predefined zone) of the advertiser during opening hours.
Every provider (including users, who are also providers with their basic services) can monitor statistics about their services usage on a user-friendly web-frontend that is connected to the backend.
On the first phase SaM Solutions implemented a prototype demo-application for internal presentations and early UDI testing. During this phase the SaM specialists focused on the Position Management, Area Management, Service Management, Mobile GUI, and the 3rd party GUI. The second phase included the Identity Management, Privacy Management, and Admin GUI implementation. Production Development and Alpha Testing on the second phase enabled several thousand simultaneous connections and requests.
The main functional features of the software are:
- Registration of user;
- Create/Edit/Delete location;
- Create/Edit/Delete service;
- Service vouchers and promotions receipt;
- Statistics monitoring (locations, services);
- Virtual notifier for invited friends;
- Push mechanism for private users (allows to directly send messages to users’ mobile clients, e.g. to notify users about their friends entering or leaving the area of their locations, inform friends about being added to a newly created location, etc.);
- TrackMe service for common users (allows the owner to see when the joined user is inside the locations).
The application is characterized by high stability, scalability, intuitive usability and appealing GUI design.
