Category: Beacons

Mr Beacon has a new video interview with Barry McGeough, who has worked with Dr. Martins, North Face and Speedo. He’s the founder and former head of innovation at PVH who work with brands such as Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger and IZOD.

The interview covers the use of RFID, barcodes and beacons by brands. Brands are increasingly needing to directly connect with consumers to assure them that they are understood. Nevertheless, retailers still control the buying process and are usually the ones to mandate use of asset tracking technologies, usually, for stock control.

The video explains how any retailer or brand using asset tracking technologies needs to make it easy and seamless. Financially, the per-unit cost of the tracking technology is especially important for lower cost commodity items such as underwear.

QR codes are ubiquitous in China and it’s expected some of the techniques will make their way to Western markets. RFID has been successful in retail where it has allowed, for example, stock tracking without having to open boxes.

Latest innovations include ‘smart mirrors’ in changing rooms that can be interacted with to request an item in a different size or find matching items. There are also usecases around checkout, security, anti-counterfeit solutions and end-of-life when it’s required to know the material makeup of an item. Tagging and apps extends the buying process to outside the store to places such as the consumers closet/wardrobe.

The conclusion is not to use technology for technology’s sake and instead invent scenarios that are easy, fun and make use of social interaction.

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We have a new short video (4 mins 43 secs) showing the BeaconRTLS™ user interface and demonstrating the REST interface that can be used by external systems (best viewed fullscreen):

Aside from the unique aspect of mixing asset tracking and IoT sensing, you can see that BeaconRTLS™ has an unusually good UI compared to most enterprise software. Software used for business tends to be clunky with screen updates requiring full page refreshes. BeaconRTLS™ uses Material Design and uses latest asynchronous techniques such that everything is rendered in the web browser as opposed to at the server which makes screen updates smooth and flicker free. More importantly, relieving the server of rendering, continuously changing, ‘live view’ web pages frees up computing resources that are better used for processing incoming beacon advertising.

Read about BeaconRTLS™

As we previously posted, there’s currently a resurgence of the use of beacons in retail. A recent article from Fujitsu says Smart shopping malls thrill visitors, drive profit.

Beacons have been used for years now to trigger offers and information in-store. The beacon marketing ecosystem changed abruptly last November when Google abandoned Nearby smartphone notifications such that all notifications now need an app.

Fujitsu is promoting the merits of having a mall-wide rather than store specific apps. A so called ‘Smart Mall’ can still drive in-store sales through smartphone notifications while at the same time provide increased added value such as mall plans, wayfinding, product comparison and price comparison.

In some ways, getting visitors to download a mall app might be less of a hard sell than downloading an app for each store. This particularly benefits the smaller stores whose apps would never get downloaded.

The data flow can be two way. Shopper movements can be tracked across stores revealing common patterns to aid improvements to flow and identification of dead areas. Sensors can be used to locate and determine the state of equipment, for example letting maintenance staff know when supplies need replenishing. There are also usecases in security preparedness for shoppers, stores and mall security staff.

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