NFC marketers form global alliance

NFC specialists Blue Bite, Proxama and Tapit have formed an alliance that will see them working together to deliver global NFC-based marketing solutions.

Blue Bite, Proxama, Tapit NFC
ALLIANCE: The three partners ‘will work together to grow quickly’

Three marketing solutions providers have teamed up to create a worldwide NFC marketing service. US-based Blue Bite will handle business in the Americas, the UK’s Proxama will look after Europe, the Middle East and Africa and Australian start-up Tapit will cover the Asia Pacific region in a venture they are calling the NFC World Alliance.

The collaboration aims to create the biggest NFC marketing business globally, and also in each of the partners’ territories.

Each firm will share information on NFC sales and marketing with the others each month, and the partners will also share sales leads and establish brand relationships between them.

Both Blue Bite and Proxama have a history of marketing using Bluetooth and Wi-Fi for location based advertising and proximity marketing, and are now both working with NFC. New York based Blue Bite uses a targeted, location-based approach to reach captive audiences on their personal mobile devices, while Proxama is a developer of proximity marketing and m-payment software applications based in Norwich, UK.

Tapit is a new business, founded this year, which works exclusively with NFC. David Cunningham, an investor in Tapit and a non-executive director at the firm, told NFC World: “Each of these three companies is the strongest English speaking, most experienced in NFC marketing for content delivery to NFC mobile phones, in its market.

“We feel in this NFC marketing-specific opportunity, the barriers to entry are very low. We have to work together now, grow quickly, and be innovators and first movers. Our aim is to get so many companies on our books that it is very hard for second and third movers to follow us. The Global NFC Marketing Alliance will be the go-to point for brands and media,” explains Cunningham.

We are building an NFC infrastructure for marketing in our respective locations, so we can change the content we deliver rapidly. We are not sharing our technology,” he continues. “Just the stats, the feedback and the relationships.”

The Alliance has targets to roll out 30,000 to 40,000 NFC tags in locations across all three companies’ regions in total by the end of 2011. That figure rises to 500,000 by the end of 2012, and 1.5 million by the end of 2013.

However, Cunningham maintains that if a game-changing NFC device should come out sooner rather than later — such as an NFC-enabled iPhone — those targets would be revised and raised.

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