Providing location based information/advertising for existing mobile phone users

In the emerging world of m-commerce potential users consistently cite location based information as one of the emergent services that they would most likely utilise. However, solutions for obtaining the specific location of a mobile user predominately rely on the provision of additional hardware and/or software within either the mobile phone or system infrastructure. Further, these techniques are often inappropriate for indoor and highly urban environments, where they are often most useful, as the line of sight to the location measurement unit is often obscured resulting in inaccurate and unreliable positional information. In this paper we present a system that can be used with any current mobile phone system to provide location based information/advertisements to any mobile phone, equipped with Bluetooth technology, without any necessity of installing client side software. The system is readily deployable and can be used to provide systems such as location based information for tourist in cities or museums or indeed location based advertisements.