Beacon Technology | 5 Cutting-Edge Retail Technology Trends

Source    : cio
By        : Sharon Goldman
Category  : Retail Technology

As retailers rev up for their busiest shopping season, they know some things never change: Holiday deal-seekers will race like mad through store aisles for the best Black Friday deals. Last-minute shoppers will wait until December 24 to make their purchases. Crowds will swarm stores the day after Christmas in a whirlwind of gift returns.

The shopping experience itself, however, has undergone massive changes over the past two decades, especially as ecommerce has won over consumers and smartphones have become the must-have accessory. These days, retailers work around the clock to navigate a digital world that continues to evolve at a dizzying pace, while tech-savvy consumers have increased their demands for seamless experiences and personalized touches, wherever and however they shop.

Here are five cutting-edge technology trends taking retail to the next level: 

1. Beacons

With millions of shoppers toting smartphones in their pocket or purse, it’s no surprise that proximity marketing, through the use of location-based technologies such as Bluetooth-connected beacons, is becoming more than a flash-in-the-pan – as retailers look for ways to provide more personalized, real-time messages, offers and promotions. According to Business Insider, beacons will directly influence over $4 billion in U.S. retail sales this year and climb 10 times that next year.


“Beacons were a novelty 15 months ago, but this year retailers are starting to take them more seriously,” says Scott Bauer, U.S. Retail & Consumer Partner at consulting firm PwC. “There’s more experimentation about how to treat users in their stores with mobile phones.” The question is how to use them, he cautions, “so it doesn’t seem creepy or annoy customers.”

2. Biometrics

Biometrics, which uses technologies like fingerprint systems, facial recognition, iris scanning and voice identification, seems like a natural fit for retailers. Brands and banks that want to improve targeted marketing efforts and boost security. Biometrics Research Group predicts the global biometrics market to soar to $15 billion this year, up from an estimated $7 just three years ago. And, technology consulting firm Frost & Sullivan forecast that nearly a half-billion people will be using a smartphone equipped with biometric technology by 2017.

“iPhone users everywhere rejoiced when Apple added the passcode fingerprint scan,” says Paley.  “Expect more in this area as marketers embrace the potential.” Ecommerce security can particularly benefit from biometrics, he says – MasterCard, for example, is working to allow customers to complete  ecommerce transactions with just a selfie, he explains, while  Visa has introduced a specification that can authenticate EMV chip card transactions using multiple forms of biometrics.

3. Mobile ecommerce boom

Mobile phones may not be no longer be cutting-edge, but the boom in mobile e-commerce certainly is, thanks to improved technologies and strategies.  By the end of 2016, 25 percent of all retail ecommerce sales in the United States will take place via mobile devices, according to eMarketer.

“The real estate on the device screen has gotten bigger, particularly in the iPhone 6, driving increased success for retailers,” says Elana Anderson, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at omnichannel commerce platform Demandware. Mobile smartphones – not tablets – drove 94 percent of the growth in shopping visits and 74% of basket creation growth, according to Demandware’s Q2 Shopping Index. “Also, retail strategies are now focused on a mobile-first consumer experience, whether it’s responsive design or increased speed,” she says. “All of that is contributing to the growth.”

4. Social networks as shopping platforms

Turns out social networks are about more than just spreading the word. Over the past year, social giants Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest have all experimented with direct “Buy” buttons on their website. For instance, Twitter tested their “Buy” button in September with a small group of sellers and are now said to be teaming up with Shopify, which has about 100,000 merchants, and other ecommerce software companies.

Pinterest’s “buyable” button, launched with Demandware, recently launched on the iPhone and iPad, allowing users to purchase without leaving the Pinterest app. “We literally had our consumers lining up, there is a lot of excitement regarding social commerce,” says Anderson. “Retailers and consumers want to remove as much friction from the buying process as possible.”

5. Digital in the store

You don’t need to leave a physical store to get your digital fix. Instead, retailers are leveraging a wide array of in-store technologies meant to draw consumers in the door.

For example, retailers and brands such as Ugg Australia, Uniqlo and Neiman Marcus are using “magic” or “memory” mirror technologies, using RFID tags, which allow customers to try on virtual outfits in different colors and styles. Rebecca Minkoff has added text messaging and touch screen features in her stores that allow consumers to order drinks, browse the store catalog, and easily interact with store associates. Finally, Bloomingdale’s has experimented with mounting  iPads in fitting rooms to allow customers to ask for help, read reviews and see what sizes are in stock.

“There’s a ton of experimentation with digital across the board,” says Anderson. “It’s really about serving the customer from the online experience out of the store all the way through the store.”


(Read More: cio.com/article/2989716/retail/5-cutting-edge-retail-technology-trends.html)

Proximity Beacon | Beacons Technology are Here to Stay

Source    :  Future Travel Experience

By        :   Ryan Ghee

Category  :  Bluetooth beacon technology

Google’s big move into the beacon market with the launch of Eddystone – an open format cross-platform Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacon solution – has intensified interest in the technology, which offers airlines and airports myriad opportunities.

Speaking to FTE, SITA Lab Lead Engineer Kevin O’Sullivan, who has worked with a variety of airlines and airports on beacon deployments, said Google’s big move into the market proves that beacons are more than a mere fad.

“I think the biggest impact of this is it confirms to everybody that beacons are here to stay,” he said. “It’s not just a flash in the pan idea that Apple has had. When you have Apple and Google and Samsung (which has its own beacon offering called Placedge) all trying to use beacons to solve this indoor proximity problem you know that the technology has got a future.” Eddystone is not, though, an “iBeacon killer”, he said. “”I think the two technologies are here to stay.”

Common use beacon infrastructure

There are other issues to be addressed, too. Tinley explained that “airports, as indoor locations that have a vested interest in maintaining some control over their “indoor airspace”, will also want to ensure that they actually have control” over the beacon infrastructure. The conversation about who “owns” this airspace is “not yet fully being had, or possibly understood”, he said, and suggested that models of best practice need to be established.

According to O’Sullivan, a common use approach is necessary. “One of the things that Eddystone still doesn’t solve that we need in this industry is the common use approach – putting in a single beacon and making it available to multiple stakeholders in the airport. It still doesn’t solve the standards that we’ve got as part of the Common Use Beacon Registry, which makes sure that a deployment at, say, Heathrow is the same as Miami and the same as Hong Kong, so as airlines go from airport to airport they can be confident that their apps can work with each beacon.”

He praised the fact that ACI and IATA are now “on board” and supporting SITA’s Common Use Beacon Registry, which aims to reduce the cost and complexity of deployment by promoting shared beacon infrastructure.

If there was any lingering doubt about whether beacons have a long-term future, the launch of Google’s Eddystone and the widespread support for the technology, plus excitement about the potential it offers, is evidence enough that beacons are here to stay.

The full potential of beacons, and the impact they can have on day-to-day operations and the passenger experience, is yet to be realized, but one thing seems certain: airlines and airports should be building beacons into their strategies now to ensure they are well placed to exploit a multitude of benefits.

(Read More: futuretravelexperience.com/2015/07/airlines-and-airports-prepare-for-google-eddystone-beacons/)

Beacons | Exploring Location-Based Technology in Museums

Source    :  metmuseum.org

By        :    Veronika Doljenkova

Category : Beacon Technology in Museums

Recently in the museum sector there has been a lot of attention given to "Beacon" or Bluetooth low energy (BLE), a technology that addresses the need for a low-cost, easy-to-implement solution for indoor location-based services. What really excites me about this technology is not that it's going to help museums build great mobile apps (we already have one of those!), but, rather, how open it is—that it opens the door for non-programmers to build their own location-based experiences and

share them with others.

Exploring the museum of Egyptian art using beacon technology

If a museum puts some beacons in its galleries, any device can find them, and any app can use those beacons to trigger content. EddyBox is an app that makes it easy to develop just these experiences.

As mobile technology is developing, the boundary between the physical and the digital user experience is rapidly disappearing. Visitors who enter enclosed public spaces such as galleries, malls, airports, and museums are expecting to receive a mobile experience that is highly relevant, convenient, and delivered in a timely and seamless manner.

For enclosed spaces with thick walls, such as those in museums, using GPS is problematic. The GPS receiver relies on continuous signal transmission from several satellite sources, so physical barriers such as thick walls can cause significant signal interference. Beacons, although a relative newcomer to the location-technology space, have proven themselves to be a seamless and robust solution for large indoor spaces.

Beacons have already been tested in diverse industries ranging from museums (Victoria and Albert Museum, Museum of Neons), to retail (Shopkick, Carrefour), to the entertainment industry (Tulipland, Coachella, Tribeca Film Festival), and airports (London's Heathrow International Airport).

With such promising case studies, the Met's MediaLab decided to test the potential of this technology for the Museum. Under the leadership of Don Undeen, the initial experiments were conducted in the MediaLab's fifth-floor space.

Beacons

Beacons are small wireless sensors that communicate with Bluetooth-enabled smart devices such as iPhones, iPads or Android by continuously advertising their location using a Bluetooth low energy radio transmitter. In turn, smart devices monitor the received signal strength indication (RSSI) and determine the device's proximity to the beacon. Apple's developer guidelines divide the proximity to the beacon into three states: immediate, near (between one and three meters), and far. Once the user is in the desired proximity range, the corresponding app content is triggered.

A typical beacon, like the Eddybox beacon, is essentially a miniature computer that, together with BLE, may include an accelerometer and a temperature sensor.

The initial beacon experiment in the MediaLab's space demonstrated that beacon technology could provide a valuable locative context to the Met's visitors—including supplementary audio and video content, and descriptions of the objects. Beyond the initial supplementary content, the beacons can be a valuable tool in informing visitors about locations of special exhibitions, libraries, dining venues, and other amenities, as well as alerting visitors about current tours and events happening relative to their location.

From the physical UX experience, however, the experiment in the MediaLab space provided a glass-house experience at best. The initial testing in the actual gallery spaces brought to the surface the host of important environmental factors to consider when working with beacons. These include gallery architecture, human traffic, interference with metal objects, temperature changes, battery life, and the customization of app's interface.

Beacon Battery Life and Temperature

One of the main advantages of beacons is supposedly their fairly long battery life. However, changes in temperature seem to have a noticeable effect on the battery life. For example, moving the beacons from the "ideal" temperature environment at the MediaLab to a considerably colder and less predictable lecture-hall space adversely impacted their battery life.

Placement and Human Traffic

Although just an observation at this point (since not enough evidence has been collected), having a group of people between the beacon and the BLE smart device may interfere with the broadcasting of the beacon set to an immediate or near regimes. The app may either start showing another beacon set to a far-proximity range or start switching back and forth between beacons in the near regime that are in the area.

The effect was more pronounced when testing in the busy area of the Arms and Armor galleries. The same "blinking" effect seems to happen if two beacons in an intermediate/near range regime are placed too close to each other, a possibility which is mentioned in Apple's iBeacon developer tools. A deeper understanding of how possible interferences such as metal and human traffic affect the beacon/device communication will be really important to create the most effective user experience.

Future Directions

Beacons and other BLE-responsive devices, although a recent phenomenon, are quickly gaining momentum across a variety of industries. As the technology is becoming better and more affordable, the Met has many opportunities to use it in order to add to the visitor experience. One route would be to develop, in-house, a custom app using tools like the Eddybox SDK, with a possibility of eventually integrating it with the Met app. Such an app can be tailored to address both aesthetic UX aspects

and challenges of the actual gallery environment. Since the physical factors such as temperature changes and human traffic seem to affect the capabilities of the hardware, it is important to investigate this phenomenon more thoroughly by recording the signal strength as a function of temperature changes and human traffic inside each gallery space in question to determine the most appropriate position for each beacon. Finally, the possibility of a beacon being hacked and hijacked should be thoroughly investigated as well.

(Read in Details: metmuseum.org/about-the-museum/museum-departments/office-of-the-director/digital-media-department/digital-underground/2015/beacons)

Beacon Technology -The Where, What, Who, How and Why

Source    : Forbes

By           : H.O. Maycotte
Category: Beacon Technology

Beacons have been generating buzz since 2013, when Apple AAPL +0.87% first introduced iBeacon technology. And while it may have appeared for a time that this new way of connecting with customers might be slow to catch on, today it’s catching fire. This year began with BI Intelligence reporting that beacons would be driving $44 billion in retail sales by 2016, up from $4 billion this year. Then last month came the big news that Apple and IBM have teamed up on a host of new apps incorporating analytics and iBeacons. And just last week, Ad Age reported on the impending reinvention of retail by digital technology, as the physical and digital worlds converge in stores.

Sounds like exactly the right time for a quick primer on beacon technology and what it’s all about. After all, as the Future of Privacy Forum has pointed out, while there’s been a lot of hype around beacons, they haven’t necessarily been very well understood. This week, I’d like to offer some “beacon basics” that I hope will provide a fundamental understanding of the technology and its potential and help more companies of all sizes benefit from it. So without further ado, here’s the where, what, who, how and why of beacons today.

Where: Or perhaps more accurately, where not

Retail is probably the most often cited example of an industry employing beacons, with heavy hitters like Macy’s and Lord & Taylor deploying them in their stores. But retail represents just one of many kinds of businesses that can benefit from beacons. Starwood Hotels is running a pilot program to replace hotel room keys with beacons. Major League Baseball is using them to reach out to fans in stadiums to offer them seat upgrades. American Airlines is one of a growing number of airlines leveraging beacon technology to improve connections with customers in airports. Meanwhile, in the B2B arena, look for beacons to start turning up everywhere from trade show booths to corporate lobbies.

What: Location-based mobile customer communication

Apple explains iBeacon technology to consumers as the enabling technology for Apple devices to alert apps or websites (which the user has opted into) when someone approaches or leaves a location. In other words, retail or other venues that have beacons in place can detect where a customer is at any given moment. Then — and this is the key part, of course — the retailer or other business can push timely messages to that customer promoting products or providing other useful information. Say someone is walking past a retail store; if they’ve downloaded the retailer’s mobile app, the company can use beacon messages to capture their attention as they go by, enticing them to enter. Once inside, beacons can be used to make personalized offers, speed checkout processes and pretty much anything else the retailer can dream up.

Who: Apple, Google GOOGL -0.31% and a growing list of manufacturers

As beacon manufacturer Kontakt has pointed out, Apple isn’t the only game in town when it comes to beacon technology. And in point of fact, Apple doesn’t actually make beacons; rather, it has developed the iBeacon standard around which beacons can be built. (Google has its own beacon standard, Eddystone.) There are a number of players in the beacon manufacturing space — not only Kontakt, but also Eddybox, BlueSense, Gelo, Estimote and others. Check out this list published earlier this year, and expect it to grow as more and more companies look to take advantage of opportunities in this space.

How: Shrinking hardware and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)

Beacons began as devices about the circumference of a large apple; today they’re mere stickers that can be placed on walls or objects. The smaller and less obtrusive they get, the easier they become to use. Beacons employ Bluetooth low-energy (BLE) wireless technology to pinpoint the location of customers in stores and other places and to deliver messages to their mobile devices. Specifically, a beacon emits a BLE signal that a retailer’s or other company’s app on a smartphone coming within range of that signal can pick up on. A big differentiator between beacons and RFID is that beacons are far more private because it gives users control of the apps that leverage the beacon. This also generally means that beacons are authenticated and with user permission, which can ultimately lead to tremendous experiences as a result.

Why: The power to revolutionize customer experiences

Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Chuck Martin called beacons “the missing piece in the whole mobile-shopping puzzle.” Pointing to the ability to push messages to people without them having to do anything at all, he sees beacons as overcoming a “major hurdle” for companies that want to engage with customers in a more personalized way — because it makes that engagement completely effortless for the customer.

Is beacon technology in your company’s future? Increasingly, the odds are that the answer will be yes.

(Source: forbes.com/sites/homaycotte/2015/09/01/beacon-technology-the-what-who-how-why-and-where/)