NEW YORK -Ten Square, San Jose, Calif., plans to expand its provision of wireless e-commerce services to 2,800 service stations and convenience stores in various cities by year-end.
The privately held company, whose lead investor is Marconi Ventures, delivers interactive content to consumers during the interlude of several minutes while they wait to refuel their vehicles.
The widespread deployment of Ten Square Digital Network technology follows a successful trial at one site in Atlanta in January. During the test, 30 percent of the station’s customers interacted with the point-of-sale terminals at the pumps to take advantage of special promotions of additional products, said Scott Slinker, president and chief executive officer.
Ten Square, an interactive point-of-sale broadcasting and publishing company, has an alliance with Hewlett-Packard Co.’s VeriFone division, which provides secure electronic-payment solutions. The agreement will enable Ten Square to use its proprietary bandwidth technology to deliver interactive content over an Internet-based network to VeriFone’s 30,000 “Ruby SuperSystem” point-of-sale terminals in the retail petroleum market.
Gasoline retailers seek to exploit point-of-sale opportunities at the pump to increase business at the convenience stores they run on their properties, Slinker said. A customer buying gas might, for example, receive a coupon that can be printed out and redeemed for a discount on a container of orange juice purchased when he or she pays for that fill-up.
“We developed the physical network that connects wireline and wireless and aggregates and delivers content to these points (of sale),” Slinker said.
“Content is loaded from an enterprise server and delivered to a local site server in the back office of the service station that stores a local copy of the content. A VPN (virtual private network) deploys location and activity based information … and docks virtually with the local server, which is only 30 feet away.”
So far, companies selling 15 brands of gasoline have made commitments to deploy the Ten Square technology in at least 500 locations. BP Amoco and Chevron, which also are venture capital investors in the company, are part of this group. Others include Arco, BuyPass, Citgo, Coastal, Conoco, Exxon Mobile, Pima, Phillips, Shell, Texaco, Tosco and Unical.
This year’s planned Ten Square rollout at 200 service stations includes 12 locations added in Atlanta in mid-March, along with deployments in San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, Calif., Houston, Dallas and Phoenix. Other cities earmarked for the new service include Chicago, Miami, Tampa, Fla., West Palm Beach, Fla., and locations in metropolitan areas in Nevada and Oregon.
Ten Square also has a contract to provide interactive content to Coca-Cola vending machines.
“These can be used for consumer polling. Answer four questions and we’ll buy you a Coke,” Slinker said.
Car manufacturers also have approached Ten Square about joining forces with the company and gasoline retailers to provide various services.
“Say you’re on a long trip and you want to download a video. The auto industry is working with us to design commercial technologies. In a car, you might have a 10-inch screen, so the video must be optimized for that display,” Slinker said.
“(General Motors’) OnStar is cellular, it’s expensive and it offers only kilobits per second (data speeds), so it won’t work well for downloading big content files.”
Ten Square also is working on a drive-up version of onboard vehicle diagnostics that would be carried out while the driver is refueling the car, he said. A pilot with major automobile manufacturers is scheduled to take place this summer.
A screen at the pump would provide the readout of any problems identified and a list of nearby dealer service centers. The vehicle operator would have the option of choosing a dealer and making an appointment electronically, then receiving a printout of the confirmation information.
To implement this service, Ten Square has signed a strategic technology agreement with Sensoria Corp., which has developed the “AutoWINS” open platform and remote diagnostic automotive applications conducted at connection rates of 11 megabits per second.
Ten Square also has an agreement with CUE Corp., whose FM subcarrier radio network covers about 95 percent of the North American population, to deliver near real-time news, sports, weather and traffic alerts to drivers based on their location.
