In-Doors Bluetooth Tracking

I note that my bluetooth on IOS is now default on.    Beacons are not new, just their broad use of data acquisition.   You are being watched.

In Stores, Secret Surveillance Tracks Your Every Move
As you shop, “beacons” are watching you, using hidden technology in your phone.
By Michael Kwet

Imagine you are shopping in your favorite grocery store. As you approach the dairy aisle, you are sent a push notification in your phone: “10 percent off your favorite yogurt! Click here to redeem your coupon.” You considered buying yogurt on your last trip to the store, but you decided against it. How did your phone know?

Your smartphone was tracking you. The grocery store got your location data and paid a shadowy group of marketers to use that information to target you with ads. Recent reports have noted how companies use data gathered from cell towers, ambient Wi-Fi, and GPS. But the location data industry has a much more precise, and unobtrusive, tool: Bluetooth beacons.

These beacons are small, inobtrusive electronic devices that are hidden throughout the grocery store; an app on your phone that communicates with them informed the company not only that you had entered the building, but that you had lingered for two minutes in front of the low-fat Chobanis.   ... " 

Indoor Precision Location

New Methods Drive Indoor Location Technologies Beyond the Beacon
Posted by David Oro  in Apps and Tools in IOTCentral

As demand for location services in all areas of the Internet of Things (IoT) grows, so too has the requirement for precision location. For many applications, especially those that need to scale to cover large areas, providing ”proximity zone” types of location is simply not accurate enough. That means the old way of determining location—primarily using Bluetooth beacons—is no longer sufficient ... "

Target Guides Customers with LEDs and Beacons

Navigation was a long time exploration of our innovation center explorations.   Here beacons and LED lights are combined with an App.

With expert discussion.

Target guides customers through the aisles with beacons    by Matthew Stern in RetailLink

Shoppers may soon have an easy way to find what they’re looking for in Target stores, thanks to a new Bluetooth beacon-enabled mapping feature on the retailer’s mobile app.

The beacons, built into the LED lighting of the stores, enable shoppers using the Target smartphone app to see their own position on a store map, according to TechCrunch. As customers move through the store, their position on the map changes correspondingly. App users can also click on products on their shopping lists to reveal the location of the item and see if it’s on sale.

While some of the most familiar implementations of beaconing technology, like triggered coupons, have proven unpopular with customers, some retailers have had success with in-store mapping. .... " 

Walmart, Tagging and Sensing

This is from a patent, which is always speculative, but shows Walmart is looking outward, even into the smart home.   Of course manufacturers might be responsible for all this tagging and packaging. Increasing costs?  Also implies some in-home beacons?    In The Verge: 

Walmart wants to put sensors on everything so it can automatically order you stuff
by Ashley Carman @ashleyrcarman

Walmart is thinking about the ways in which the Internet of Things could get more products into shoppers’ homes. In a patent publicly revealed this week and spotted by CB Insights, the company describes a system of connected sensors that could monitor customers’ product consumption. The sensors would be attached to products and rely on a variety of technology, like radio frequencies, Bluetooth, conventional barcodes, and RFID tags.

Walmart doesn’t suggest that any one sensor type would work best; rather, it lays out its options. Apparently it has a lot of ideas: these tags would all track how often a product is used and where it’s located in a home. They could also help Walmart figure out what other products it could market to users based off their purchases.  .... " 

UPS Using Beacons for Accuracy

It sounds like the beacons are being used to get indoor accuracy to affirm location.  And alert the system to misplacement. Reducing error.   In ChainstoreAge: 

UPS uses beacons to quell shipping errors,   By Deena M Amato-McCoy

Preload Smart Scan uses smart technology to avoid this issue. Specifically, the program comprises Bluetooth-enabled beacons that communicate with package-scanning devices worn by UPS employees as they load packages onto vehicles. The scanners, which read package labels, are programed to know where a package belongs in a specific vehicle.  ... "

New Beacons for Personalized Service

Was recently asked to look at the status of beacon applications, new examples of increased 'intelligence' at play.

New Beacon Company Brings Intelligence to In-Flight Entertainment, Banks

Conichiwa, a spinoff of German hotel app firm conichi, is providing systems that recognize an individual or item based on beacon transmissions, and can thus personalize service or improve efficiency.  By Claire Swedberg  ... 

Locating People in the Wild

Located beacons can detect people's mobile IDs in store and even on the street.  A powerful move to establish consumer journey.  I had heard of related methods some time ago, by testing and ID'ing people just walking into a store.

Programmatic Advertisers Get Even More Precise Consumer Location Data With New Pact   By  Kate Kay  In Adage.

GPS Navigation in Tunnels

Navigation via Waze, but only in tunnels with Waze beacon support.    " .... Waze worked with Bluvision to create custom beacon hardware designed to suit moving vehicles and solve historic, tunnel-specific location challenges. This makes Waze the first navigation app to accurately route drivers, in real time, as they navigate through tunnels where Waze Beacons are installed. ... " 

Macy's to RFID Tag Everything

We were early innovators in the RFID tagging space. Saw it expand widely at the case level.  I now see this as an area where you can use some of the same learning for the internet of things,    The 'thing'  here simply announces its ID number to a reader or beacon.

Especially useful where you are seeking the ability to look for key value equations for visibility into the supply chain.  A powerful analytic tool.  Here the point is made that there is real value into letting the customer 'see' the supply chain.  Macy's taking the process to the item level for everything, still unusual in retail.  Described below in Retail Wire, with discussions.

Macy’s to RFID tag everything by George Anderson

Macy’s plans to expand its use of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to track every item in its stores and fulfillment centers by the end of next year. The move is expected to give the department store the visibility into its supply chain needed to fully deliver on the promise of a seamless omnichannel shopping experience for its customers.

“I don’t know how, in an omnichannel, data-driven … world, you can take data accuracy lightly,” Bill Connell, senior vice president of logistics and operations at Macy’s, told RFID Journal. “The customer base is increasingly demanding. ‘I want it. I want to know you have it. I want to tell you how I want you to get it to me. And I want to do that right now.’ If you don’t have that level of confidence in your data, you have a pretty big problem.”  ... ' 

Estimote Mirror Beacon

Combining Smart Beacons to Displays

A retailer can connect the Mirror to a TV through HDMI and USB, usually found on the side or back of the TV. Once connected, the beacon can pair with a nearby smartphone and send relevant data to large displays, which can show additional details.

Estimote gives a few examples, an airport screen could provide personalized data of your flight and the easiest route to the gate; a retailer could tell you if a shoe is available in your size.

Connecting multiple displays—a smartphone and a TV—gives retailers more opportunity to entice customers. A retailer might check your recently searched Google results and show applicable products at the store window, with a reduced price.

Medical Sensing from Smartphones

Good overview of the current state of technology using smartphones for medical sensing.  In Technology Review.   Adaptable with current tech, odd-ons and remote sensing beacons.

Sensors as Awareness of Things

CWorld writes about what they call 'Awareness of Things' gadgets.  I mentioned one of them,  the 'Dot' recently.   A kind of cheap primitive beacon that can can provide focused information to your devices, like a smartphone.   A good additional example is the ThermoPeanut, a simple thermometer, that connects to a phone App via low energy Smart Bluetooth.  More examples in the article.

  These are not part of the IoT, because they have no IP address. (?) Or are they simpler sensor-only one-way connections?   I much like the cheap and simple angle of this new direction.  Links to IFTTT at the device end to have specialized alerts to the user?  I see that ThermoPeanut is so linked.

I recall an application where we wanted to understand temperature information from a container  of agricultural commodities so we could sort the bins for initial sample testing.  Would have been a great way to do this simply, would have saved a great deal of resources and thus money.

Mood Science and the Internet of Things

Anyone who works with advertising and marketing ideas wants to measure and influence aspects of mood in  a number of context.   Much has been made of neuromarketing ideas in recent years.   'Things'  that can  influence mood could be packaging, product, context, promotion, shelf and fixture.

And things that influence, can also measure and interconnect.   Measuring means data you can leverage it.  We mocked up a number of related ideas, starting with the simplest RFID tags.   Consider links with Beacons too.    Lots of interesting thoughts in the article linked to below.

These IoT Sensors Want to Know How You Feel – And Maybe Even Change Your Mood  Posted by William Vorhies  

Summary:  Sensors that know how you feel?  Sensors that want to change the way you feel?  When did that happen and better yet how?  ... 

Mood Science
" ... I’ve been tracking the uses of IoT sensors particularly those with human interaction (think Fitbit) but I didn’t see the big picture until I came across this article “Design for Mood: Twenty Activity-Based Opportunities to Design for Mood Regulation” by Pieter M. A. Desmet, a member of the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology.  This is one of those articles you know you should trust because it contains a reference bibliography of 169 learned articles.

For the most part it seems that in academic circles the desire to determine how to ‘regulate mood’ is pretty benign and generally couched in terms like improving subjective well-being.  After all who doesn’t want an extra helping of well-being? .... " 

Beacon System for Push Notification

A very simple idea, a small device that can generate an alert for a push notification based on context and location. .  Note this is unrelated in function to the Amazon Dot, even though it looks similar.

Seeing this more generally as a way to construct an IoT network in a smart home that can react intelligently to its inhabitants and mobile devices.

In FastCodesign:  This $20 Dot Makes Push Notifications Way Less Annoying ... Now on Kickstarter, these small Bluetooth beacons contextualize how your smartphone behaves based on your location.

" ...  GPS just doesn't have the granularity to determine whether or not you're in your bedroom or your home office, which is why companies like Apple use supplementary hardware called iBeacons to provide customers contextual information throughout their stores. Google has a similar project, called Nearby, that pings users in public places like museums and stores.

Dot is a set of beacon-like devices for your home and other personal spaces that allow you to contextualize your push notifications. A Dot is essentially a Bluetooth beacon that you stick on any surface. As your smartphone gets closer, it can detect the exact distance based upon signal strength, and send a push notification when you get within a certain distance. What's cool about Dot is that you can program that notification to contain anything, through an app inspired by popular internet recipe-making platform IFTTT (an acronym for "If This, Then That"). A Dot can just as easily be programmed to remind your roommate to take out the trash as it can turn on the smart lights to your bedroom when you walk in the room. ... "  

Google on Beacons Reshaping Marketing

In ThinkwithGoogle:

" ... Beacon technology is poised to change the way consumers interact with brands, making devices more helpful and revolutionizing the way retailers measure the offline impact of online ads.

 When it comes to cutting-edge marketing, one technology is top of mind: beacons. In fact, more than a million beacons are expected to be installed in U.S. retail stores this year alone. But right now, many marketers only think about using beacons to push phone notifications. At Google, we think beacons have the potential to do much, much more for consumers, brands, and marketers. 

To realize this potential, we created Eddystone and the Google beacon platform. With these platforms, beacons are no longer limited to communicating only with a brand's app. Brands can integrate beacons with Google products and services, as well as their own and their partners' apps. For consumers, this means a frictionless shopping experience, with fewer gaps between channels. For retailers, it means reaching the right person at the right time with the right message, with new and improved metrics to measure success.  ... "

Beacons Now Support NFC

Estimote Supports NFC.  Recall some question about the use of beacons with NFC in a past project.   This advance addresses another RFID related approach.    " .... Google announced last month that its Play Store will start notifying users of pertinent apps they might want to download based off their location. App developers will need beacons to trigger those notifications, and Estimote’s location beacons are one possible choice for them. Though those beacons were released only a few months ago, they're already being updated to include programmable NFC ....  "

Project Tango Video

Video of project Tango, using a smartphone, here used to map and discover contents of a Barcelona complex museum floor.   Consider retail applications to make navigation, discovery and engagement more intelligent.     With existing smartphone hardware.   Further connection with Beacon technologies that associate for engagement?

Talk on Using Retail Beacons

In Retailwire: 
" ... There is hope for in-store beacons yet, but the primary ways retailers have been implementing them thus far have been the wrong ones. That was the main takeaway in a session given by Adam Silverman, principal analyst at Forrester Research, accompanied by Jeff Douglas, general manager of e-commerce at Nebraska Furniture Mart, at the Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition in Chicago last week.

In his presentation, Mr. Silverman showed that, in response to the question, “How interested would you be in allowing your smartphone to interact with beacon technology in a store environment to help offer the following contextual experiences?” special offers, loyalty rewards and rewards for checking in to the store topped the list. These results, however, may be deceptive, as they could reflect customers’ stated desires and not actual behavior.   ...  "            by Matthew Stern. 

Beacons Doubling

Have seen and been asked about a number of applications.   Our environment is becoming more aware, attentive to needs and requests.  This is a form of location aware bots.

Beacons Double This Year, On Way To 400 Million In Market by Chuck Martin
While there will be billions of Internet-connected consumer things ranging from wearables to appliances, one of the most visible objects for marketers still will be beacons, at least into the foreseeable future. ... " 

Beacons and Ad Timing

  In Mediapost: Beacons Determine Best Time To Send Ads, ID When Shopper 'Due' For Store Visit by Chuck Martin 

Beacons were always good at being able to trigger a message or ad based on a consumer’s location, but now they’re being used to better predict exactly when that message should be sent.

And based on recent testing, it looks like adding the right time into the purchase cycle can actually increase purchase intent.

In a campaign for Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner, such a targeting campaign achieved 55% average brand awareness, 25% post-engagement purchase intent and 3 times ROI, according to data from InMarket, the beacon platform company, and digital agency Crescendo Collective. .... "