A Beacon of Hope For American Startups
Dynamite comes in small packages. Or in this case, small wireless sensors called Beacons, that cunning startups & small businesses are deploying to attract and keep nearby customers.
“Well, it’s about time,” said Hedy Lamar at the ripe old age of 80, when she finally received recognition for a wartime invention and patent that was the precursor to bluetooth technology and its latest iteration, beacons, which are attracting the attention of CEO’s across America.
Just before World War II broke out, Lamar was a famous Hollywood actress, a lover to Howard Hughes, and regarded in her time as one of the “most beautiful women on Earth.”
Also a prolific inventor, she turned her attention to creating a frequency-hopping signal for torpedos that could not be tracked and jammed. The patent was largely forgotten until Dr. Jaap Hartsen invented Bluetooth while working at Ericsson in the 1990s and rediscovered her work. He considered her patent a valuable contribution to modern day wireless technologies.
Fast forward three decades into the current age of mobile smartphones and cloud computing, and suddenly new opportunities appear for small businesses to engage customers using the power of custom apps — and more specifically — bluetooth proximity services that stream offers, coupons and information to smartphones.
Pioneered first by Apple with iBeacon and then by Google with the Eddystone platform, software developers now have the ability to build custom applications that talk to low-powered radio transmitters via cloud APIs giving business owners unrivaled ways to target and convert customers.
To help you visualize its potential, consider this example from The Harvard Business Review: A customer approaching a jewelry counter in a department store receives a message from a tiny beacon sticker planted in the wedding ring section, offering information or promotional details relating specifically to pricing, discounts and diamond carat-size.
In another example, imagine visiting an art gallery and receiving an automatic message on your phone highlighting additional information (including video) about a particular oil painting you are looking at right now. Perhaps this features a special interview with the painter and his approach to creativity.
The examples above can be repurposed towards retail, healthcare, car dealerships and motor yacht brokerages. In fact, just about any object can be tagged with a small beacon device that allows software programmers to attach imagery, video and descriptive information that can be sent to nearby prospects and their smartphones.
Many consider this technology a giant killer, because it gives startups, micro businesses and entrepreneurs the ability to deploy sophisticated custom apps in the same manner as Fortune 500 companies, including Amazon and Walmart.
In fact, you may have heard of Amazon Go, which the online behemoth is testing at some of its new cashless grocery stores attached to WholeFoods. This variation uses machine learning and Artificial Intelligence to communicate with your smartphone when you enter the store. Shoppers simply grab their groceries off the shelf and depart the store with no further interaction with registers of any kind. The algorithm automatically debits the shopper’s account.
While not specifically a form of beacon technology, it shows the direction retail industry is moving in with regards tracking the user’s phone and his interaction with store products.
Beacon technology offers a much simpler and direct way to a give users more relevant contextual information to their phone when they come in close proximity to your restaurant, apparel store or healthcare operation.
Mobile Application Companies like PK Solutions can connect any existing database including Oracle, SQL Server, or Filemaker Pro with beacon technology, allowing a virtually unlimited scope in the types of customs apps a company may wish to deploy using proximity technology. This also extends to scheduling & appointment software, inventory applications or CRMs such as Salesforce or Netsuite.
This trend is expected to accelerate over the next decade, with more than 1 million beacons already installed across America in what many are calling the Omni Channel Shopping Revolution. Incredibly, expect close to 800 million connected devices powered by Bluetooth by the end of this year!
Google, the inventor of the Eddystone platform that allows software developers to quickly rig up communications between a smartphone and a beacon device, cites recent innovation in aviation sector, notably United Airlines, whose bluetooth app enables flyers prepare for an upcoming flight by helping them install in-flight entertainment app for their mobile devices.
The broader travel, tourism and hospitality sector (which encompasses airlines) trails only the retail sector in terms of beacon installations in the United States.
Meanwhile, Global Market Insights predicts the healthcare sector is primed for high growth towards 2024, improving healthcare management systems including efficient patient tracking, asset monitoring and healthcare security and compliance.
All of the industry sectors above can immediately leverage the power of Beacon technology by purchasing a micro bluetooth device from these approved manufacturers on the Google platform, including Estimote and Radius Network. Simply stick or place the tiny device on any product or locational area of company operations.
They can then contract a custom software development firm like PK Solutions and their Software Masterminds to develop specific proximity-based app that that connects the beacons via the cloud to users who sign up for nearby services.
Google’s rival, IBeacon from Apple, works in similar open-source fashion giving small businesses the ability to scale quickly and affordably using the power of Bluetooth.
“From welcoming people as they arrive at a sporting event to providing information about a nearby museum exhibit, iBeacon opens a new world of possibilities for location awareness, and countless opportunities for interactivity between iOS devices and iBeacon hardware,” said Apple.
Because both Apple and Google treat beacons as cloud objects, application developers can now access the devices as if they were pieces of software. This enables both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) apps in several different scenarios.
To picture this landscape, consider what happens if the government were to beaconize an entire city, allowing businesses and software development companies the ability to extract data and build new products and services.
Behold, The #SmartCity.
This actually happened in Amsterdam, where officials decided to install several hundred beacons on buses, bus terminals, trams, and various other inner-city routes for public API access via the cloud. This #SmartCity allows any developer to access any beacon using code they build within Android Studio or Apple Cocoa Pop. Specifically, the iBeacon Mile is specifically intended as a living lab, where any citizen, company or university can test and develop applications.
“Everyone can walk along the iBeacon Mile and try these new apps so we can experience what the project iBeacon Living Lab and the City of Amsterdam have achieved in cooperation with several partners,” said IoT Living Lab.
A concrete example “living’ inside this #SmartCity would be beacons placed at shelters at bus and tram stops around the central station. Advertisers can target their audience and send messages to specific shelters or billboards.
This ambitious project above can be mimicked by a small business owner who wishes to enable beacons within his storefront or healthcare operation. By making specific beacons publically accessible, a custom app can be built by an outsourced software development team, allowing other businesses, partners and consumers to interact with that public data.
There are other uses for beacons too, including optimizing employee operations within an organization. For instance, Bosna Enterprises, an NGO employing blind and visually impaired people, recently opened a giant, new headquarters stretching over 17,000feet in length.
In order to help their hard-working staff get around, it deployed an indoor navigation system driven by 2-inch by 2-inch plastic bluetooth beacons and other iOS assistive technology. The beacons transmit location information to employees iPhones, telling them where they are in the labyrinth and guiding them to offices, restrooms, and the company bistro.
According to TechTarget, the beacons are also installed on Warehouse forklifts to warn employees when this dangerous machinery is nearby. They also alert staff to wet-floors (via beacon-enabled stop signs) and help them move away from spills.
These indoor guidance systems are expected to be in great demand over the next several years.
The Lighthouse Effect
Beacons are analogous to Lighthouses in the promise they hold for guiding both consumers and employees through various buying or productivity workflows, stages or tasks.
Since a beacon can be attached to just about anything it opens up new features for business owners to explore relationships with nearby customers or to ensure employees are safer and conduct their operations in a more efficient manner.
It can also be extended to government agencies or city infrastructure to make services more transparent and useful to both businesses and consumers. The magic sauce covering all these examples above are the open source platforms provided by both Google and Apple via the cloud.
This infrastructure-as-a-Service married to the Internet of Things (IoT) via low-powered bluetooth beacons gives CEOs a range of new marketing and productivity weapons through which to arm customers (and staff) with relevant, contextual information.
Website development companies like PK Solutions are at the forefront of building these new custom apps for small businesses based on beacon technology which is set to reach exponential proportions by 2024.
However, lets not forget the fantastic contributions of a Hollywood starlet who made her inventing mark during wartime and laid the first seeds of the Bluetooth revolution and its offspring, beacon technology.
