With heat like New York’s been having, it’s not to early to dream about skiing and snowboarding, especially when mobile technology will let winter athletes engage more closely than ever with each other–and their resorts.

Vail Resorts announced today that this coming season, it will deploy mobile a mobile strategy called EpicMix. The plan consists of a mobile application as well as RF (radio frequency) chips embedded in lift tickets, season passes, and the lifts themselves at the company’s Vail, Beavercreek, Breckenridge, Keystone and Heavenly resorts. EpicMix lets guests track the distance they’ve gone down the slopes; announce when and where they are on the mountain, and meet up with friends via private messaging; share blow-by-blow accounts in real-time via Facebook and Twitter; and even win “rewards” from the resort, in the form of collectible pins, based on their activities.

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Placecast today announced a new partnership with Location Labs to bolster the ability to track device location for its unique ShopAlerts location-based marketing platform.

Location Labs provides detailed device location data direct from national carriers rather than requiring users to download an app or otherwise.  In doing so, Location Labs can instantly acquire the location of more than 180M potential consumers across the US — regardless of carrier networks or whether the user is using a smartphone or a feature phone.  Given its technology and expansive reach, Placecast saw it as a perfect opportunity to leverage.

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Let’s face it, proximity marketing has largely failed in North America given its less-than-perfect user experience, privacy issues and host of other barriers, but that doesn’t mean some providers aren’t seeing success — even if it is self-proclaimed.

A company called FuturLink, provider of so-called “intelligent marketing technologies,” claims its proximity marketing solution has powered over 16M mobile downloads via Bluetooth worldwide — including the US.  Adding all proximity marketing campaigns using FuturLink technology, around 200 million mobile phones have received an invitation to download a file for free via Bluetooth, with “an important amount of recurrent users.”

FuturLink uses Bluetooth Access Points which are usually located in retail environments or public spaces on a permanent basis or just temporarily for a certain campaign, and allows brands and content owners to reach mobile phone users through devices that send videos, images, coupons, applications, games, etc., with no cost for each content distribution.

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Qdero Pateo, the innovative mobile technology company we’ve covered many times in the past, announced today they’ve partnered with Kommunity Kiosk, a leader in providing touch screen directories and kiosks for the hotel industry, to launch its Blu-Pons proximity marketing technology at national franchise hotel chain locations.

The combination of technology from the two companies enables advertisers to reach consumers directly through their mobile devices via QderoPateo’s proprietary Blu-Pons Bluetooth media solution.  The technology is now co-located with many Kommunity Kiosk hotel locations, including major hotel franchises such as Marriott, Doubletree and Crowne Plaza.

Here’s how it works; through Blu-Pons, consumers who enter a hotel location have the option of allowing valuable coupons and discounts to be sent directly to their Bluetooth enabled cell phone.  Once a customer accepts the opt-in prompt, the discount is delivered directly to their mobile device and can be readily presented for redemption at the participating retailer.

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Placecast, a mobile advertising company known for its utilization of location-based “geofencing,” today issued a press release detailing why it thinks up to 40% of location data sets are incorrect, and how it’s new “MatchAPI” is helping to change it.

The company’s unique MatchAPI, put simply, is Placecast’s solution for cleaning and managing location-based data.  It works by resolving the two most challenging problems of working with large location-based data sets.  First, it disambiguates addresses by identifying all of the different ways to express the address of a location and verifying that those differing expressions refer to the same place.

Second, it maps all the relevant IDs from different content providers to that same place so that it’s always referred to correctly by any other system.  According to the company, the system has already been “pressure-tested for scale,” citing that the MatchAPI has already been in place for more than a year and has already processed more than 20 million location records worldwide.

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There’s a ton of social networking and mobile chat apps out there, but a new one called EZChat caught my eye for its network-independent, location-based “random chat” functionality.

The app is pretty straightforward, it uses WiFi and Bluetooth to determine your location, find other EZChat users in close proximity, and displays profiles for you to “like,” dislike,” or “maybe,” to decide whether you want to chat with them in real-time, or save the profile for later.

I like it because it’s dead simple and doesn’t try to cram 100 different social networking features into one app.  It does location-based social discovery and chatting in real-time, and does it well.  The only problem, as inherent with most new social networking apps, is the fact that it has a small user-base at the moment, meaning you’ll likely never find anyone else around you that has EZChat installed.

According to Ronnie Zohar, Founder of EZChat, “We firmly believe that most people care about maximizing opportunities in the ‘here and now.’ Even though it would be wonderful to get to know people in a far away location, it is much more productive to meet people who are in our close vicinity whether it’s for business or pleasure.”

The app is worth checking out; it’s available for the iPhone, iPod Touch and the iPad- available now in the App Store.

When it comes to proximity marketing, there’s those that understand its benefits and risks, and those that simply feel it’s not viable given concerns related to consumer privacy, consent and other various issues.

Those opinions aside, the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) just released the results of three unique proximity marketing case studies centered around Blismobile and several of its clients based around the U.K.

The first was a campaign for Krispy Kreme, which interestingly enough, was the company’s first advertising campaign in the newly entered U.K. market.  Large billboard calls-to-action were used to drive brand awareness and customer loyalty via bluetooth downloads, and was a huge success in the end. During the 15-day campaign, Krispy Kreme generated 48,154 downloads total.

The second involved a branded mobile app campaign centered around Pot Noodle, which included placing large calls-to-action on various commuter trains throughout London to “refresh a saturated strong brand.”  The campaign pushed downloads of a free branded game and created a viral effect in the process.  During the four week campaign, Pot Noodle received just over 95,000 downloads total, far exceeding most expectations, all from encouraging commuters to turn on their bluetooth to download a game.

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