Australian startup Bluedot Innovation has won a partnership deal with the mobile commerce platform for Taco Bell, Sonic and other major US brands.
Cardfree, a mobile commerce company, has signed an exclusive agreement to use Bluedot’s location-based services technology in US restaurants. Bluedot will enable restaurants to send marketing to customers based on their location.
Bluedot, a Melbourne-based startup profiled in 2013 in Techworld Australia, sells a patented SDK for geolocation that can obtain the precise location of a person’s smartphone for payments without the battery drain usually associated with GPS use.
Earlier this year, Bluedot announced an expansion into the US after raising $2.5 million in its most recent funding round.
Cardfree said it plans to offer standalone Bluedot services as well as integrate the startup's technology into its own platform.
Cardfree and Bluedot plan to extend the service to markets outside the US later this year, the companies said.
“We are happy to answer the overwhelming merchant interest in location-based marketing by presenting our customers with an exclusive technology that is more accurate and seamless than current solutions in market,” said Cardfree CEO Jon Squire
“Though we enable beacons as well as other approaches, we are extremely excited to offer our customers Bluedot’s cutting-edge alternative that addresses the need for easy, precise and cost-effective location-services.”
Adam Bender covers telco and enterprise tech issues for Computerworld and is the author of dystopian sci-fi novels We, The Watched and Divided We Fall. Follow him on Twitter: @WatchAdam
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