Category: Beacons

We have been using UPS shipping for just over a month now and have just refined our shipping options based on past customer orders and our costs. UPS offer two main services, UPS Standard that goes by road and UPS Express that goes by air.

We have found that UPS Standard to some European countries is taking 5 to 6 business days which we can now improve on for some countries. For Italy, Spain, Austria, Finland, Greece, Denmark and Sweden we now always send by UPS Express (by air) for a similar cost as was the case for UPS Standard. This has a delivery time of 1 to 2 days to most business areas.

UPS Standard goes via the new London Hub that shows as ‘Stanford Le Hope, United Kingdom’ in the tracking. This is UPS’s largest single infrastructure investment outside of the United States. View the video:

The London Hub is 32,000-square metres in size and has a capacity to process up to 28,000 packages per hour. It’s part of UPS’s $2 billion infrastructure investment programme in Europe.

UPS Express gets to via East Midlands airport by the evening of the day it is picked up from us and shows as ‘Castle Donington, United Kingdom’ in the tracking.

Freight flights leave every evening to Europe and North America that are delivered in 1 to 2 working days to Europe and 2-3 days to N America.

View the shipping page for a summary of delivery costs and time scales.

Products are increasing including iBeacon or more generic Bluetooth LE advertising in order to identify themselves to apps. There’s the recent example of the Tesla 3.

Higher end WiFi access points such as the mesh Linksys VELOP also use Bluetooth for identification in mobile apps. Recently we came across a new wireless security system, AJAX, that also uses iBeacon for identification to apps:

Bluetooth advertising provides a solution to the ‘chicken and egg’ problem of how to connect to a product to set it up, before it has been set up and connected to a (usually WiFi) network.

There’s a video on Facebook where the Spencer Matthews from BBC’s Watchdog programme looks into beacons:

We were contacted by a researcher from BBC Watchdog as they wanted to understand the mechanism and were initially confused as to whether the devices in stores were receiving phone Bluetooth signals or the other way around, phones receiving Bluetooth signals.

What the video doesn’t say is apps are needed to see the beacons. In the case of Facebook this will be Facebook app. You can turn off Bluetooth for that app if you don’t want to be tracked. However, as the video explains, Bluetooth is only one mechanism. WiFi, GPS and cell tower data can also be used to determine location.

Getting back to beacons, Google has an under-promoted similar mechanism ‘Project Beacon’ tied to Adwords where you can work out if an ad caused a store visit.

As there’s no official web site or information, it’s unclear if ‘Project Beacon’ is still active.

The BBC Watchdog video shows how many consumers see such adverts as intrusive and creepy. As previously with Eddysone URL, marketers are being too blunt, alienating consumers and it’s a turn-off. Instead they need to provide useful information and tools, not adverts, then convert the consumer to a sale. Marketers need to put in place marketing that causes the consumer to say, “That’s cool, I must tell my friends” rather than “That’s creepy”.

We have been involved in writing some articles for a new magazine site Industry 4.0 SME.

The site is targeted at CEOs, COOs, CTOs and innovation managers in Small and Medium size Enterprises (SMEs). It provides high level articles on the opportunities, strategies and technologies involved in Industry 4.0. It’s updated daily with the latest Industry 4.0 news.