Proximity marketing is growing 200% year-over-year. Some estimates say that by 2020, more than 75% of retailers will have a proximity marketing strategy.

The drawback? It’s expensive. Between buying and installing hardware, developing an engaging mobile app (and getting people to download it), and then integrating listening software into that app, solutions can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars – way too much for your local band, mom-and-pop store, or art market vendor.

Tchirp is bringing proximity marketing to the little guy.

With Tchirp, everyone can engage in proximity marketing. Using our free iPhone app, anyone can create a Tchirp profile – a blurb, picture and links of his/her choice. Then simply plug your phone into a speaker, and hit “broadcast.” Your profile is now downloadable by anyone within earshot through an inaudible audio signal.

Tchirp generates a variable unique identifier, which is then translated into a multi-bit signal. This signal is transmitted ultrasonically and received by the smartphone's microphone. The listening phone processes incoming sound using traditional digital signal processing methods to clean and accentuate the ultrasonic band. The resulting audio is analyzed using a combination of statistical measures and a pre-trained neural-network to determine which ultrasonic unique identifier is being broadcast. Redundancy and error detection assure that only the correct identifier is received.