NFC Times Exclusive: Despite a widespread belief in some circles that NFC and Bluetooth low energy, or BLE, are in competition, a number of observers say they believe that the two technologies will fill complementary market niches, especially in retail marketing and wearable devices.
In mobile advertising, BLE is widely seen as a technology for push advertising, which detects the presence of mobile handsets with a retailer’s application installed and then transmits messages to those users’ handsets at a preset distance, perhaps 50 meters away. NFC works at a much more immediate range and requires users to deliberately tap a tag in order to receive marketing messages or content on their handsets, which marketers refer to as pull marketing.
For instance, U.S.-based Thinaire and marketing firm News America have rolled out a combination of NFC and BLE marketing in thousands of grocery stores and drugstores in the U.S. The deployment includes BLE beacons installed at points of sale, which can send messages to customers walking across the parking lot to the store.
