We're super excited about this new beacon design! We released our "commercial grade" Model X (5 year battery life, weatherproof, secure) beacon earlier this year and have tons of great feedback and huge deployments. We also heard that people wanted a super tiny beacon they could use in displays, packaging, attach it backpacks and laptops, etc. So we listened and built the Model O! I'd love to hear your thoughts and answer any questions.
@dannynewman With this sort of cost I could definitely see myself deploying them throughout the house and even in the general vicinity. Thinking one could go in the letterbox/driveway entrance so you have a super-accurate geo-fence trigger when you arrive or leave home.
Maybe even have two in the driveway to detect direction and execute different actions. When you detect A then B, unlock my door, B then A, lock the door.
IoT is fun :)
I think the *primary* use case is context for an app/user. How close is user X to beacon Y. This creates a lot of really interesting use cases. There are user facing scenarios as well as examples that look at real world analytics of pathing, dwell time, repeat visits, etc.
The early and obvious uses are pushing ads/messages to phones as someone comes into proximity of a beacon. "$1 off Ritz Crackerfuls" as you walk down the cracker aisle.
Another interesting use is non user facing, not sending a push notification, but instead alerting a staff member of a users presence. You walk into the electronics section and a staff member gets a notification "Micah has just entered the electronics section, he loves new gadgets".
Like you mention, indoor location is another HUGE area for this tech. You can create indoor positioning, wayfinding, and routing over any number of floors, something that GPS just can't do. (we do a lot of this in malls, stadiums, etc.)
Where we see the biggest growth right now is "real world attribution". Micah was researching a product online, and then went to a retail store 2 days later. Or Micah saw this ad, and came into the restaurant 4 hours later.
The last year beacon usage has grown significantly. Late 2013/early 2014, brands and retailers were testing things out, small proof of concepts. By the middle of the year though, they started doing full on rollouts and I see this continuing to accelerate both in the US and internationally.
"alerting a staff member of a users presence" - this. Imagine Open Table providing restaurants with data on the full life-cycle of a user, from search to interest to being seated (and at what table). They could in turn tie that data and the resulting review to who the server was at that table as well as what the user ordered, not just what they took a picture of.
Who knows whether restaurants would be able to leverage such data, but the idea of it is interesting.
@d2burke I've spoken with team members at really (really) high end restaurants who differentiate this exact way - think Benu in SF, Alinea Chicago. An operations team focused on customer experience starting weeks out, including research on LinkedIn to avoid seating you next to people you compete with or might know. Detailed records of your meal so that when you come back the menu is a 'next step' forward in your experience based on your first meal there.
Seems beacons and robust CRM and other new tech could take this kind of detail-oriented focus into more settings - super exciting:)
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