version 3.0 (Released On October 13, 2009)
- Added Promotion Advertisement type: In addition to File, Business Card and Event Calendar advertisement types, we thought it would be great if we added a new type to allow BlueMagnet users to send promotions to their customers. Using this new advertisement type, you can send promotions and coupons at specific intervals that you set from the advertisement options. Moreover, you can also set how many times you want this promotion to be delivered, so, as soon as the specified number is reached, BlueMagnet will deactivate the advertisement and wait for the next cycle.
- Added support for automatic authentication: We found that there are some phones in the market which require pairing with BlueMagnet before we can deliver advertisements to them. Samsung and Motorola are some examples of such phones. With this new feature, BlueMagnet will be able to handle the authentication process automatically and deliver the content to these phones. This means a better delivery rate for your advertisements.
- Added a WatchDog Utility: In some cases where the advertising area is very busy, we found that running BlueMagnet for a long time decreases its efficiency and will make the sending process very slow. So, we introduced this new utility that will keep watching BlueMagnet and reboot your computer when necessary. This utility was designed so that it runs in the background. So, you can set it for the first time and it will keep handling the watching task without any intervention.
- Deliver multiple advertisements to the same device without requesting permission for each file separately: When you’re sending many advertisements to the same phone, a problem comes up in which the recipient will have to accept each and every advertisement. For instance, if you’re sending 5 advertisements, the recipient will have to accept the 5 advertisements one by one. With this new feature, all your advertisements will be delivered as soon as the recipient accepts the first one.
Note: This feature may not work on all phone models
- Fixed a problem with the toolbar: A small problem in the behavior of the toolbar was detected and solved. This problem caused the toolbar status to become incorrect in some situations.
- Fixed a problem with the scheduling feature that caused some advertisements to stay inactive when they should be active: With the new fix, the scheduled advertisements will work perfectly as intended.
- Fixed a scheduling problem which caused sending all advertisements as soon as the first advertisement becomes active: When sending multiple advertisements based on a schedule, we found that one scheduled advertisement is enough to trigger the rest of the advertisements and make them all active even if some of these advertisements are still scheduled for later delivery. In this case, apparently, some advertisements used to be delivered when they’re not supposed to. We fixed that.
- A feature to reset a specific device status: If you’re running a campaign and one of the recipients asked you to resend him or her that advertisement again, which happens very frequently in busy areas, you’ll find that the only solution to do that is by resetting the campaign which means that all the advertisements will be sent again to everyone even if they’ve already received or rejected them. With this feature, you can simply double-click the customer’s device in the Detected Devices List and BlueMagnet will reset that device status and contact it again.
- Intelligent System to provide optimization tips that makes your campaign run better: This feature was introduced to help the users to set their campaign to run in the most efficient way. With this intelligent system, you’ll see a yellow bar with exclamation mark at the top of your BlueMagnet screen. By clicking that bar, BlueMagnet will show a list of tips that you can apply so that your campaign will run better.
- Fixed a problem with the reports format that caused them to look incorrect when opened using Microsoft Excel: We’ve received many reports about Microsoft Excel showing the reports generated by BlueMagnet in one column instead of multiple columns. We found that the problem was in the regional settings of the different computers. With this fix, we changed BlueMagnet in order to detect the computer’s regional settings and generate the correct report accordingly.
- Added support for multiple lines in the "Msg" field of the Business Card advertisement: Delivering text messages using the “Business Card” instead of creating a text file is a very common approach. The Business Card is usually stored in the recipient’s contacts and it can also be understood by almost all phones available now. With that being said, we thought that adding the multiline support to the “Msg” field will be a great idea. Simply use the “\n” mark without the quotes to insert a new line in your message.
- Added Alarm feature to the Calendar Event advertisement: With this new feature you can set an alarm to your Calendar Event advertisements. This means that when the recipients accept your advertisement and store it in their calendar, the phone will ring at the specific time you set to remind them of your advertisement. How cool is that?!!
- Automatic Saving feature for the campaign: To avoid losing your data and the settings inside your campaign, we introduced the automatic saving feature. So, if let’s assume that you’re running BlueMagnet in a busy area and your computer hanged for some reason, when you reboot it again, and start BlueMagnet, it will automatically load the last automatically saved campaign and preserve your data including the last detected devices along with their status.
- An option to control how long it would take to complete searching for new devices in the premises: When running BlueMagnet in a dynamic environment with people moving and cars in the street, BlueMagnet will spend a lot of time trying to detect as many devices as possible. The problem is that the detected devices are moving and if they are not contacted very fast, they’ll go out of range and far away from BlueMagnet’s reach. It would be better if BlueMagnet could search fast even if this meant getting fewer devices. This feature will control how long BlueMagnet is allowed to spend looking for new devices in the area. By setting this value to 10 seconds, BlueMagnet will just spend 10 second looking. After that, it will start contacting the new detected devices.
- Updated the automatic reset of the campaign to use Days, Hours and Minutes instead of just Hours: In some cases, you may need to automatically reset the running campaign every 5 minutes. This feature allows you to do exactly that.
- An option to save the detected Bluetooth devices inside the campaign file: We’ve added this feature so that you can save the detected devices inside your campaign. This means that if you need to reboot your computer for instance, you can load the campaign again and start advertising without losing any of the devices that were contacted earlier.
- A feature to embed advertisement files inside the campaign file: This feature was introduced to help make managing the campaign easier. After you save the campaign with embedding enabled, all you have to move is your campaign file. You don’t need to keep track of your advertisement files. BlueMagnet will handle that for you.
- A new option to restrict sending advertisements to cell-phones only: In busy areas, BlueMagnet will be detecting a lot of devices that cannot receive or understand your advertisements. For instance, GPS car systems will be detected, but they will not accept your advertisements. In such situations, BlueMagnet will waste a lot of time trying to contact these devices although we already know they’ll not accept them. This option allows you to restrict BlueMagnet to contact cell-phones only which we know that will receive and present your ads.
- Fixed some bugs and problems in the Bluetooth sending algorithm: We introduced some enhancements to the BlueMagnet sending algorithm that will make it run faster and more efficient.
- Introduced some enhancements to the Diagnosis Tool including automatic authentication: The Diagnosis Tool has received some interface enhancements in addition to a link that will take you to the Hardware Troubleshooting guide. In addition to that, we added support for automatic authentication inside the Diagnosis Tool as well so that it will handle devices with extra security.
- Enhancing the user interface: We’ve made some enhancements to the user interface especially in the Advertisements Sidebar.
- Enhanced memory management: we’ve made some changes to enhance BlueMagnet’s memory management.
