Here are 4 questions to David Slocombe Co-founder and Ceo Oystar :

Oystar (Oy*) is a small business loyalty software for mobile phones that enables small businesses to tap the 10 million Oyster (NFC compatible) travel cards in circulation in the UK as a loyalty card base.Using our software, small businesses can create, distribute and redeem loyalty rewards using an NFC enabled handset and track the effectiveness of campaigns in a way that has traditionally been the sole domain of large chain stores. Travel is the number one incentive for consumers ahead of even free merchandise so Oy* integration with the Oyster travel card scheme can enable this for customers in the near future.Retailers can distribute points, vouchers and promotions to their customers Oyster cards by simply touching their Oyster travel card to their Oy* NFC Handset. Brands can offer eco-friendly digital incentives such as discounts products or even travel credit replacing merchandise incentives such as free DVD’s, magazines and mass-produced gadgets. These rewards can be distributed through our network of Oy* subscribers directly to consumers at the point of purchase.OY* is currently under development with the goal of a UK trial in cooperation with selected stores and advertisers in 2007.

Can you tell us more about your service?
If you open your wallet you’ll find on average 3-4 plastic royalty cards and a much larger number of paper ones. People forget or lose them, getting a new one again and again from Café Nero, Homebase and Habitat to name a few. People carry them around in a hope of remembering and redeeming some of them one day and feeling good about getting that 10th cup of coffee free. We all know this feeling.
Oy* will solve exactly that problem. The Oyster travel card is the one item people in the UK have in their wallets that does not require them to search through their wallets in a panic at the point of sale. They can just wave their wallet past an NFC phone and its done. Sometimes they will get a free coffee, other times a free ride. For consumers this is a vast improvement in the service experience compared to current systems. ( examples )

What is your business model?
Our aim is to perfect loyalty services based on the powerful features that are specific to near field technology in mobile handsets. Once deployed in trial, we will work with brands, agencies and local retailers to deliver their promotions to consumers and learn from observation how to go live with a desirable service for consumers and small businesses. Oy* has the potential to be equitable for every stakeholder in the service ecology in ways that have not been possible before the advent of NFC mobile technology.

What are the current users’ feedback, your learnings on the service’s usage?
We have been working with local businesses to learn how they work on a day-to-day basis and how best our product can meet their needs. For example, in one London based newsagent we discovered that the newspaper distributors required the shop to document and return all coupons brought in by customers and return the unsold newspapers to the distributor otherwise they would be charged for them by direct debit. This creates a heavy workload on the shop staff at the end of the day and the fear of financial losses on a business already operating on small margins. If the Sunday papers that come with free DVD’s are not sold, the DVD’s are just thrown away creating huge amounts of landfill waste. These are just some of the failings of the current systems that we are designing out of promotion schemes through the Oy* software.

What are the projects, additional features you’re preparing?
Starting with the shop trials this year we will be enabling a loyalty system for Oyster travel cards. As the handset market evolves over time we will start to see consumer handsets with NFC capabilities so we already have the consumer ‘wallet’ application in development. The Oy* brand for local businesses is operated by the UK based innovation studio, Project Bureau, which will be developing a white label application that is an NFC based loyalty layer that can extend existing loyalty services using this new mobile technology.