A CASE FOR CONNECTION:

Transcription

1 A CASE FOR CONNECTION: Redefining the Real-Time Customer Experience with Beacons In Balance 1

2 Table of Contents Introduction...3 Key Takeaways...4 What are beacons?...5 How do beacons work?...7 Discovery...8 Proximity...8 Payload...9 Why do beacons matter?...11 Cloud Implications...11 Big Data Implications...13 Marketing Implications...14 Security Implications...14 Beacon Usage Scenarios...15 Retail...15 Healthcare Providers...18 Travel and Transportation...19 Other Scenarios...20 Recommendations...22 Deployment Checklist...22 Assess your mobile messaging and notification services...23 Integrate Location Services Into Your Core Business And Technology Architecture...24 Leverage Beacons With Cloud Services To Strengthen Your Digital Strategy...24 Appendix...27 Definitions and Acronyms...27 References and Further Reading...28 About this White Paper

3 IMAGINE THIS on your way to work one morning, you walk by your favorite coffee shop. As soon as you do, a message pops up on your phone, personalized to you - today, your favorite blend of coffee is half off if you stop by in the next two hours. Turning around, you head into the coffee shop, grab some delicious, discounted coffee and continue on your way. What a nice way to start the morning! Not only was this promotion beneficial for you, but for the coffee company as well. Using the power of wireless sensors known as beacons, they were able to bring you into the shop and obtain data on what brought you in, time of day, what you purchased, etc. The example highlighted above is achievable today. This white paper explores the technology and business implications of beacons. Major technology vendors such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nokia and Qualcomm are making beacons a significant part of their strategy and product roadmap. This is important because your customers and employees will increasingly expect beacon-enabled capabilities in the coming months. 3

4 KEY TAKEAWAYS Why do beacons matter, particularly for non-technology companies in different industries? How can these companies use and get themselves ready for beacons and location-based services? A few conclusions we ve gathered: The pace of adoption will vary, but industries such as retail, healthcare and travel will be most affected by beacons and indoor location awareness. Legacy solutions for indoor positioning have existed for several years, but a lack of common industry standards resulted in highly proprietary technology that was expensive to maintain and inhibited mass deployment. Beacon technology is more consumer friendly and leverages existing infrastructure such as wi-fi networks, smartphone and tablet devices, as well as low-cost Bluetooth wireless sensors. Beacons use new technology that dramatically lowers the barriers to enterprise adoption and enables customer-focused companies to deliver more contextual information through location awareness. Examples include: Personalized services for customers in specific locations in your company s facility Action-based rewards programs that are not specific to a single physical location but are transferable Targeted alerts and time-sensitive notifications for users within the proximity of a few meters Easy check-in that gives users the ability to bypass waiting in long lines Beacons and indoor positioning will disrupt companies who under-invested in mobile applications. Mobile-friendly websites and pure HTML5 web apps don t support beacons. As a result, companies that have limited experience with native or hybrid mobile applications will find themselves scrambling to catch up with competitors. Now is a good time to re-evaluate your mobility strategy and identify customer or employee usage scenarios that would benefit from better location-based services. The data generated by beacons and indoor positioning accelerates big data initiatives. By improving the facilitation of data sharing between digital services and physical objects, beacons enable buildings, entertainment venues and physical places to become intelligent. The digital handshakes between beacons and mobile devices enable big data usage scenarios that harness whole new dimensions of location-based, contextual analytics. 4

5 WHAT ARE BEACONS? A beacon is essentially a small sensor that operates on very low battery power and has a range of less than 100 meters. Beacons can be attached to buildings, products, vehicles, or any item of interest. Using Bluetooth, newer smartphones can sense when one or more beacons is nearby. The combination of beacons, mobile apps and cloud sevices has all the makings of a compelling technology paradigm for several industries including retail, travel and healthcare, to name a few. Image courtesy of Estimote 5

6 WHAT ARE BEACONS? Technically, beacons are micro-location, context-aware Bluetooth Low Energy devices, but you ll rarely hear them described in such engineer-infused verbiage unless you are at a technical conference on the subject. However, such a wordy definition is good for understanding the two critical functions of a beacon: 1. Micro-location - beacons serve a very small geographic location, with a practical radius of about 50 meters. 2. Context aware - beacons (or, more specifically, the apps they serve) are intelligent in that they understand the context in which they are placed. For example, beacons know they are located in the 2nd floor of a department store, or the radiology wing of a hospital, or attached to the wall behind the newest exhibit at the local museum. In terms of size, beacons are designed to be small and unobtrusive. Most beacons easily fit in the palm of your hand and are designed to attach to buildings and products. It is also important to distinguish beacons from related location-based technology. Unlike GPS, beacons do not rely on satellites in geostationary orbit above the earth. Although both technologies can be used for navigation, GPS is far more complicated and power-hungry compared to beacons. GPS is also notoriously bad for indoor navigation, whereas beacons are perfectly suited for indoor uses. Near Field Communication (NFC) is a relatively new technology that is strikingly similar to beacons in that NFC uses proximity between two objects to exchange information. However, NFC is based on a technology called Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) that operates at much shorter distances and involves a more complicated protocol between the two end-points. Despite its youth, beacon technology is rapidly maturing into a powerful way to connect people and things using a smartphone. Beacons are all about proximity and context. For our discussion on beacons, proximity is a distance measured in meters or feet between a beacon and a person s phone or tablet. Context refers to any details relating to the object that the beacon represents (a location, a product, a piece of art, etc.) 6

7 HOW DO BEACONS WORK? Beacons are a public protocol built on top of the Bluetooth Low Energy standard, which has been present for several years in smartphones and tablet devices. Any device that announces itself using this profile is a beacon, which means that beacons can also be iphones, ipads, Android phones, Windows Phones or numerous other device form factors. Beacons broadcast messages on a recurring basis to all devices within range of the Bluetooth radio embedded in these mobile devices. Image courtesy of The Nerdery blog.nerdery.com 7

8 HOW DO BEACONS WORK? To really understand how beacons work, there are three terms you should know: discovery, proximity, and payload. Discovery Let s say you have deployed several beacons throughout your facility. They just sit there, waiting for someone with a smartphone to walk by. To be effective, your mobile app needs the ability discover these beacons. Discovery is a well-choreographed dance between the smartphone and the beacon. As the smartphone comes within range of a particular beacon, the smartphone will receive its first bits of information about the beacon. To wit: Hi, I m a beacon. My name is ABCD-1234-EFGH Armed with that information, your mobile app can decide if it cares about that beacon and perform a particular action or provide contextual information to your user. On the other hand, if your app doesn t care about the beacon or isn t configured for beacon awareness, then it will do nothing. One important distinction about discovery is that the relevant app installed on your smartphone or tablet does not need to be actively running to discover beacons. In other words, the digital handshake between beacons and devices can occur even when your users are not actively using the mobile app. Beacon signals are also capable of launching a mobile app on a user s device. Proximity As the name implies, proximity is concerned with the distance between the smartphone and the beacon. In theory, beacons have a range of about 100 meters and proximity is reported using signal strength between the smartphone and the beacon. But, in general, it s easier to think of proximity in relative terms such as far, near and immediate. Think of the far range as when the beacon is first discovered by the smartphone. Near means that the smartphone is getting close (within a couple of meters) to the beacon. Immediate implies that the smartphone and the beacon are practically touching. Anecdotally, the following range definitions are typical: Far = less than 50 meters Near = less than 10 meters Immediate = less than 1 meter Proximity can be used to give feedback for directional navigation or for deciding when to alert the user about whatever the beacon represents. This brings us then to payload. After your app decides that it cares about a particular beacon, the next step is proximity. 8

9 HOW DO BEACONS WORK? Payload Since beacons are low energy sensors, they transmit very small amounts of data or payload to nearby receivers. This payload consists of (3) required data elements: Universally Unique Identifier (UUID), Major Value and Minor Value. Beacons can be organized using the following scheme: UUID this is a 16-byte alphanumeric string that is universally unique to each beacon. Think of this as the unique IP number that is used to identify each and every beacon. All of your beacons must be configured to use the same UUID Beacon Configuration Now that you understand how beacons transmit information, the next step is learning how to configure beacons for your application or business scenario. Beacon-enabled applications are created using a Software Development Kit, or SDK, which is used by mobile developers for Apple ios, Google Android, Microsoft Windows Phone or other mobile operating systems. Here s a picture of an Estimote beacon software development kit (SDK) for Google Android: Major Value this is a 4-byte integer that is used to group related beacons that have the same proximity UUID. Think of this as something you can use to identify a particular region where beacons are located. Often times, a state or city is used: Miami = 0 Columbus = 1 Boston = 2 Chicago = 3 Minor Value this is a 4-byte integer that differentiates beacons with the same UUID and major value. In other words, this is helps you identify a more granular location or type of resource from which the beacon is attached: 0000 = unknown 1000 = restaurant 2000 = store 3000 = gas station Regardless of how you choose to use beacons, these three pieces of information are transmitted from the beacon to the mobile device. What you choose to do with these three data elements is based on your mobility strategy and application requirements. Image courtesy of Estimote It is critical that you design a scheme for your beacons before you begin developing your application and deploying your beacons in any type of real-world usage scenarios. After deploying multiple beacons in the field is not the time to consider re-organizing your scheme, because this can quickly become a significant level of effort. Choose your scheme wisely! 9

10 HOW DO BEACONS WORK? Primary Signal Secondary Signal None of the major smartphone manufacturers such as Apple, Google or Microsoft produce Positioning Signal Wi-Fi Base Station Low Cost Beacon Cellular Towers Global Navigation Satellite Systems dedicated beacon hardware. This means thirdparty companies such as Estimote, Qualcomm and others are the primary suppliers of dedicated beacon sensors. Processing You are here Smartphone algorithms motion sensors compass microphone cameras Cloud-based location assistance (optional) While smartphone manufacturers are not producing dedicated beacon sensors, the majority of current smartphones and tablets are compatible with the beacon profile and Bluetooth Low Energy standard: For Apple, ios 7.0 or higher is required, with the followingdevices supported: - iphone 4s and later - ipad 3rd generation and later - ipod Touch 5th generation and later For Google, Android 4.3 (also known as Jelly Bean) is the entry point into beacons Location Data Indoor maps Venue/mobile app data For Microsoft, all Windows Phone devices running Windows 8.1 or higher support beacons With Apple, Google and Microsoft all supporting Bluetooth Smart Ready products, beacons are effectively supported by all relevant mobile platforms and operating systems in the market. 10

11 WHY DO BEACONS MATTER? Beacons have implications far beyond mobile applications. But to add real business value, we need to understand how to craft meaningful real-world engagements that improve the user experience. Indeed, we believe several of todays most important business technology trends will have a force multiplier effect on adoption and relevance of beacons in our personal and professional lives. Cloud Implications While beacons are important and relevant due to compatibility with many smartphones and tablets, beacons really come alive when connected to the cloud via online web services. For example, a mobile app with a static list of beacons is useful, but will eventually grow stale due to lack of new features or compelling user experiences. Yet, when these same beacons and smartphones are connected via cloud-based services and online databases, we can provide continuous, contextually aware information and services that are capable of adapting content based on user preferences, time of day, visit frequency and other real-time data. 11

12 WHY DO BEACONS MATTER? To understand how the cloud enhances beacon apps, let s start with a simple scenario using the coffee shop example: A coffee shop has a mobile app that displays store hours and menu items. The owner has asked you to modernize the app by placing a beacon just outside the shop. The owner s thinking is that adding a beacon just outside the coffee shop would be a good way to entice customers to stop in as they walked near the shop. With a beacon in hand, you could detect when that beacon was nearby and alert the user with a friendly message: Hi, stop in for a cup of coffee. No cloud, no connectivity, just straightforward beacon detection and simple messaging. Now, let s add the cloud to this scenario and see how all sorts of possibilities emerge. The beacon detection is the same, except for one key addition. When the app detects the beacon, it asks a web service in the cloud for information about that beacon. The information about the beacon stored in the cloud can be just about anything (location, type of beacon, etc.), but the key is that, now, the app is dynamic and contextual based on the beacon/cloud interaction. 12

13 WHY DO BEACONS MATTER? Hi, stop in for a cup of coffee. The cloud allows our coffee shop business to change their messaging content, show daily specials, promote upcoming events, and so on. Your iphone knows something about your coffee preferences, and the cloud customizes these messages to your individual tastes: Welcome back, Chris. How about stopping in for a tasty mocha latte? The cloud also collects anonymous usage data for the coffee shop s IT system, including customer foot traffic, shopping frequency, time of day and sales activity, so the coffee shop owner can configure menu items and pricing for varying levels of customer demand. Big Data Implications Beacons have significant implications for big data. Combining beacons with cloud services generates a digital trail of customer interactions and touch points that will help determine how business intelligence and data analytics will evolve. As the number of deployed beacons increase, the usage scenarios for the data generated by these wireless sensors are enormous. Data from beacon-based apps will be used to improve processes related to operations management, supply chain, product development and countless others. Fueling all of these fact-based, near-real-time insights is a powerful set of analytics that aggregates and synthesizes the data, enabling faster decision-making, predictive trends modeling, sales forecasting and discovery of hidden relationships between seemingly independent factors. 13

14 WHY DO BEACONS MATTER? Marketing Implications Let s continue using our coffee shop as an example. Imagine a scenario where a customer walks by the beacon-enabled coffee shop and the coffee shop s mobile app sends a personalized advertising message to the customer s smartphone. How does the coffee shop owner know if these ads have any effect on enticing customers to walk into the shop? Certainly the coffee shop owner could ask each customer if they saw the ad, but this approach is clumsy. On the other hand, what if the coffee shop owner placed a second beacon inside the door of the coffee shop? If the customer receives the ad and continues on without stopping in, your beacon data has identified those lost customers. But the second beacon captures customers who enter the coffee shop s front door, which means we have a clearer picture of customers that saw the advertising message and made the decision to enter the coffee shop. In other words, our coffee shop owner can more accurately track the effectiveness of advertising messages. In essence, the combination of mobile devices, wi-fi networks and low-cost beacons enable an entirely new category of business intelligence through location analytics. Customer tracking data can be captured and analyzed, then accessed via online dashboards. The scale of data collected by early adopters of this technology is staggering. According to Harvard Business Review, this futuristic data collection is already well underway. Location analytics firms currently track more than 500 million shoppers per year by collecting data from more than 65,000 sensors installed in thousands of retail stores. A single customer visit alone can result in more than 10,000 unique data points, not including the data gathered at the point of sale. Security Implications Every app needs to have some consideration for security, even if that means accepting that your app has no security. For beacons, the discussion on security need not focus on the communication between the beacon and the smartphone, because all communication between the beacon and receiving devices is completely UNSECURED. However, recall that the payload only consists of a UUID and a major and minor version. There s no direct information about your business data or customer information. Where security comes into play with beacons is the transfer of data from the cloud to your app. Cloud security is beyond the scope of this white paper, but there is a wealth of information available on what measures you can take to secure your app s cloud conversations. 14

15 BEACON USAGE SCENARIOS Retail Beacons are being used with increasing frequency across the retail industry to enhance the customer experience in brick-and-mortar stores, as well as provide customers with targeted, contextual information in a timely manner. The opportunities and implications for retailers include the following: 1. Provide digital coupons and promotional content that is personalized for the in-store shopping experience. Customers have access to product information in real time, which is more effective than print coupon mailers. 2. Monitor location analytics on customer traffic patterns inside the store to improve floor plan layouts, displays and shelf optimization. 3. Drive loyalty based on a shop/reward model. 4. Use beacons to mitigate showrooming, the practice of using smartphones to research merchandise in-store and then shop online for lower prices. 15

16 BEACON USAGE SCENARIOS Here s a real-world example of how beacons can be used in a retailer setting: 1. Proximity Marketing (0-10 meters) Window shoppers and general passersby meeting a specific demographic receive an incentive to enter the store 2. Entering the Store As they enter the front door, passerby becomes an active shopper and receives a check-in coupon 3. Gathering Information Once inside the store, individual offers and promotional materials can be displayed on the shopper s smartphone 4. Contactless Payment After selecting an item, shoppers can view pricing and details about the items being acquired on their smartphone. As the shopper leaves, their credit card or payment account is charged, which is integrated with the retailer s point-of-sale system. Image courtesy of Estimote 16

17 BEACON USAGE SCENARIOS Retailers of all sizes are investing in beacons and in-store mobile marketing services: Shopkick is an app that rewards customers for just being in a shop. It provides information about products and also gives back rewards based on the activity of the customer, such as products purchased or areas visited. Macy s did a trial with the Shopkick iphone app at their New York and San Francisco stores. This trial was conducted using ibeacons (Apple s version of this technology) and participating customers were provided recommendations and also shown promotions based on the proximity to a beacon placed in an area. Apple has also updated its Apple Store app using ibeacon such that a customer walking into a mall or outlet to pick up the product at the Apple store is given an easy and smooth experience. Apple has implemented this at more than 250 stores nationwide. The advantage of beacons over technologies like Near Field Communication (NFC) and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is that beacons fit more seamlessly in the customer s shopping experience because they do not require customers to tap on an NFC or RFID tag to get more information. More customers are using smartphones to shop and large percentages of these smartphones already support beacon technology, making beacons cheaper to adapt versus NFC and RFID. Some observers have argued that beacon technology is still in an infancy phase. However, the first-movers in retail strongly believe that better ad targeting and personalized promotions provided by beacons are more useful to customers and increase the likelihood of customers buying more products. American Eagle Outfitters used Shopkick and deployed beacons in 100 stores nationwide to provide customers a rewarding shopping experience. The Shopkick app provided users a welcome message on entering the store and also directed them to items tagged ahead of time from a computer. Safeway and Giant Eagle have added ibeacons to 200 grocery stores nationwide. 17

18 BEACON USAGE SCENARIOS Healthcare Providers While current adoption of beacons in healthcare settings is lagging other industries such as retail, there are interesting implications for healthcare providers. Two of the more significant usage scenarios for beacons in healthcare are indoor turn-by-turn navigation and asset tracking of durable medical equipment (DME). Most visitors to a hospital are not familiar with the layout of the building(s) when they arrive. Furthermore, most hospital visits tend to be stressful activities. One way of reducing this stress is with an app that shows visitors common areas of the hospital easily, such as the waiting room, the cafeteria, the nearest restroom and the chapel. Giving the visitors turn-by-turn directions from their current location to their destination is an added bonus. As with most indoor locations, signal quality eliminates GPS as an option for turn-by-turn navigation. Instead, some other method of triangulating a user s current location must be used. Until recently, this meant using expensive wi-fi positioning systems. Beacons can perform the same task (of triangulating a user s location) at a fraction of the cost of wi-fi positioning systems. In this scenario, beacons are placed throughout the hospital, especially in key locations. The beacons are spaced close enough so that a visitor is ideally always in proximity of one or more beacons. The more beacons, the better the accuracy in triangulating the visitor s location. While turn-by-turn navigation is ideal for visitors to the hospital, healthcare workers generally know their way around the building. However, keeping track of durable medical equipment is not as simple. In addition, locating a piece of medical equipment during an emergency could be a matter far more urgent than getting directions to the cafeteria. Beacons can be used to manage where DME is at all times. Whether it s a large MRI machine or a small blood pressure cuff, a beacon can be attached. And, unlike traditional asset tags, beacons send out a signal that can be discovered by an app. This difference is important when several pieces of equipment look the same and may even be in the same storage area. Using beacons in this scenario can eliminate possible confusion when choosing the right piece of equipment. Looking ahead to future usage scenarios, beacon-enabled healthcare apps will be capable of interfacing with users' individual healthcare data. For example, Apple s upcoming ios 8 platform contains a new set of features known as Healthkit that enables users to store health information in a secure container on their iphone. Beacon-enabled healthcare apps will access this secure container and provide information about user activity levels, vitals and other health metrics without requiring a tracking device, meaning that the iphone will be able to track all of that health information on its own. This digital health data container can be used to further personalize coordination of care and monitor patient outcomes. 18

19 BEACON USAGE SCENARIOS Travel and Transportation Much like the retail sector, beacons are being used to help build customer loyalty in the travel and transportation industry. Rich content experiences tailored to traveler s individual preferences are making our business and personal travel experiences more efficient and enjoyable. Beacons allow companies and travelers to: Offer location-sensitive itineraries and specials at a resort Locate your vehicle in a crowded rental car garage Find your group at an amusement park Announce your stop on trains and other mass transit Broadcast availability and discounts at the airport lounge Push tour content and point-of-interest information as a virtual tour guide A sampling of those in the travel and transportation industry that are moving toward beacons include: Virgin Atlantic and American Airlines are testing beacons to offer upgrades, announce gate changes and offer seat upgrades to their most loyal passengers while in the gate area. Dutch amusement park Tulpenland (Tulip Land) is set to use beacons to provide a more content rich experience and push reward programs. Disney s Magic Kingdom has introduced MagicBands, which is a system that uses sensor-equipped wristbands to enhance the entire spectrum of their Disney experience, including trip planning, ticketing and access to payment and photo management. While each of these scenarios have been historically possible through Near Field Communications (NFC), we are seeing a larger migration to beacon technologies due to broader vendor support, a fresh new look and, more often than not, lower deployment costs. Unlike NFC, the open architecture of Bluetooth and open web standards will foster greater innovation in data analytics by hotels, airlines, resorts and commercial property management vendors in the form of personalized offers and promotions for travelers. Image courtesy of The Walt Disney Co. disneyworld.disney.go.com 19

20 BEACON USAGE SCENARIOS Other Scenarios Sports and Entertainment Venues During the final games of the 2013 season, the Miami Dolphins deployed ibeacons to provide a better customer experience during game time. These beacons, combined with the Dolphins iphone app, were leveraged to provide attendees with information on short food lines and coupons for snacks. The National Football League also deployed beacons at the 2014 Super Bowl. Football fans using the NFL mobile app received messages on their iphone and Android phones based on their location inside the stadium. The beacons were also placed throughout Midtown Manhattan to deliver relevant messages based on user locations before, during and after the game. Similar systems were also deployed at the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. Self-Guided Tours Beacons are also ideal for self-guided tours where audio and video content can be accessed based on a user s location proximity to an exhibit, such as: Museums Zoos Art Galleries Parks Simply place a beacon on each item/location of interest and arrange the content in your app to coincide with the nearest beacon. The American Museum of Natural History and the Royal British Columbia Museum have created an automated reality experience for museum visitors that incorporate indoor positioning to enhance the museum experience. These apps use indoor positioning to augment exhibit content with videos and archival materials, let visitors create custom tours of the museum based on their interests (with turn-by-turn navigation to guide them through the museum) and share information on the exhibit they are viewing via social networks. 20

21 BEACON USAGE SCENARIOS Home Automation Several Beacon forums and videos have touched on the concept of home automation. The idea is that as you walk through your home (with your smartphone on your person), beacons placed throughout your house will enable things such as: Turning on and off the lights as you enter and leave a room Opening the garage door as your car enters the driveway Locking the doors as you leave for the day Turning on the TV as you enter the den The possibilities in this area are bounded only by your imagination and available hardware. Geo-fencing Geo-fencing refers to placing a (virtual) fence around a geographical area. A geo-fence defines an area that can be monitored for things going into or out of the area. For example, a geo-fence could be placed around a school, monitoring students as they enter and exit the campus. Geo-fencing is typically implemented using GPS. Thus, beacons would allow geo-fencing to be brought indoors. Most modern smartphones such as Apple iphone, Google Android, and Microsoft Windows Phone support beacons and geo-fencing. Your app will need to discover beacons using the Bluetooth interface on the smartphone. Depending on your user s proximity to individual beacons, your app will determine what action, if any, needs to be taken. 21

22 RECOMMENDATIONS This white paper has hopefully helped you understand the rewards and implications of adding beacons to your mobile app. Interfacing with a beacon is simple since the beacon broadcasts a very small payload of data. What your company does with this data is up to you, but we have a few ideas to help you get started. Deployment Checklist So let s assume that you ve decided to incorporate beacons into your core business or technology infrastructure. Where should you get started? What s next? How do you avoid repeating the mistakes of early adopters and bleeding edge pioneers? Here s a short list of best practices to get you started, with some key steps for beacon deployment. Centric has found that beacon deployments are most successful when they are broken down into smaller tasks: Site mapping - determine the size of the area where the beacons will be deployed. Site visit - visit the site where beacons will be deployed to determine if there are any obstacles that might hinder deployment such as weather, property restrictions, or any other environmental problems. Beacon placement - determine where each beacon will be placed to maximize coverage and minimize number of beacons needed. Beacon classification - determine if there is any classification required by your app (eg. restaurant, retail store, movie theater). This is important for setting UUID, major and minor values. Beacon configuration - set the values of UUID, major and minor version values of each beacon according to the scheme designed for your app. Several tools are available for configuring beacons. Final deployment - place configured beacons in each location. Test run - do a test run at the location to make sure all beacons are active and discoverable by the app. Go live - make sure app is in the appropriate app stores, server(s) is up, fingers crossed. Ongoing maintenance - check beacons for theft, damage, battery life. Retirement - some deployments are transitory and must be set up and taken down periodically. Make sure beacons are labeled appropriately to allow for packaging and traveling. 22

23 RECOMMENDATIONS Assess your mobile messaging and notification services While many smartphone and tablet applications provide location-based services for mapping and navigation, they are insufficient for places where we spend 90 percent of our lives: indoors. Indoor positioning resolves this issue by improving the accuracy of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). This means that your company s future mobile applications may need to provide contextual and relevant alerts and notifications based on the position of objects, floor plans or points of interest within residential and commercial buildings. Outdoor maps Indoor maps Roads, neighborhoods, buildings, landmarks, and points of interest Floor plans, rooms, floors, elevators, aisles, product, services, and equipment Source: Google Maps website and app 23

24 RECOMMENDATIONS Integrate Location Services Into Your Core Business And Technology Architecture The opportunities and implications of beacons extend well beyond the IT organization. Successful beacon deployments will require investments in several areas of your company s business architecture: CRM and customer analytics remember all that usage data and click-through information that comes from your company website? Now, imagine having access to location data that enables you to understand user behavior (anonymously, of course) for metrics such as duration of visit, frequency of visits and response time. Space planning and facility management large facilities such as hospitals and hotel convention centers should leverage their data-rich backend systems to power new mobile user experiences with indoor positioning services. This makes it possible to find the exact location of a person, product or piece of equipment by tying together mobile devices with beacon sensors. Ultimately, this brings us one step closer to the Internet of Things, in which objects, people, etc. have a unique identifier that gives them the ability to transfer data through a network without interacting with other people or other computers. Leverage Beacons To Strengthen Your Digital Strategy Increasingly, we see organizations looking to leverage mobile, social media, data analytics and cloud as the core foundation of a broader digital strategy. Beacons and wireless sensor technologies introduce a new paradigm for organizations to leverage location and contextual awareness as key ingredients of a seamless and engaging customer experience. 24

25 So, how do you get started? Begin by taking a good look at how your customers interact with your organization online as well as offline. Look for interactions where location or contextual awareness could influence your customer s behavior or provide a differentiating experience before, during or after key decisions. Next, transform your mobile user experiences from static to dynamic by integrating your mobile apps with the cloud. Pushing data from mobile devices to the cloud opens up new Big Data and business model opportunities such as analytics, real-time monitoring and usage trending. Finally, start including mobile analytics to measure and analyze future mobile business initiatives. Now is also a good time to re-assess your IT strategy around using HTML5 versus mobile apps for customers and employees. Remember, a mobile website won t support beacons or indoor navigation usage scenarios. 25

26 CONCLUSION As you sip your next cup of coffee, take a few minutes to think about beacons. How can your organization use beacons to provide a better customer experience? Would better access to employee or customer location information improve an existing business process or outdated administrative procedure? Beacons are an emerging technology, and early adopters will likely experience some bumps in the road. At the same time, we live in an increasingly mobile world that is always looking for the next big thing. Companies that cater to this need and have the courage to be innovative are the ones that truly succeed. Hopefully this white paper provides a good foundation for evaluating whether beacons can assist your organization s business strategy and gives you some inspiration on how to integrate beacons into your own initiatives. What are you waiting for? 26

27 Appendix Definitions and Acronyms Beacon - a generic term for a Bluetooth Smart sensor. Bluetooth - a wireless technology standard for exchanging data over short distances from fixed and mobile devices. Bluetooth Classic - the original Bluetooth specification invented by Ericsson in The Classic specification encompasses Bluetooth 1.0 through Bluetooth 3.0. BLE - Bluetooth Low Energy - See Bluetooth Smart below. Bluetooth Smart - Bluetooth designed for novel applications in the healthcare, fitness, security and home entertainment industries. Also known as the Bluetooth 4.0 specification. Differences from Bluetooth Classic include lower power consumption, shorter distances, and smaller payloads. GPS - Global Positioning System - a space-based satellite navigation system that provides location and time information in all weather conditions, anywhere on or near the Earth where there is an unobstructed line of sight to four or more GPS satellites. ibeacon - an indoor positioning system developed by Apple and built on top of the Bluetooth Smart technology. First introduced in ios 7. NFC - Near Field Communication - a set of standards for smartphones and similar devices to establish radio communication with each other by touching them together or bringing them into proximity, usually no more than a few inches. RFID - Radio Frequency Identification - the wireless, non-contact use of radio-frequency electromagnetic fields to transfer data, for the purposes of automatically identifying and tracking tags attached to objects. SIG - Special Interest Group UUID - Universally Unique Identifier - a sequence of randomly generated, alphanumeric characters, designed to be practically unique across time and space. Wi-Fi - Wireless Fidelity - a popular technology that allows an electronic device to exchange data or connect to the internet wirelessly using radio waves. 27

28 References and Further Reading ibeacon Bluetooth Smart Estimote Forrester Todally Kontakt Gimbal Macys Apple Major League Baseball content_id= &vkey=news_mlb National Football League Superbowl Tulpenland Virgin Atlantic American Airlines Brazilian carriers Disney Nerdery Harvard Business Review 28

29 About this White Paper Written By: Jason Miller National Mobility Chris Martinez Centric Miami Paul Holway Centric St. Parag Joshi Centric Additional Contributors: Mike Brannan National Technology Practice William Klos National Cloud Mathew Sheets National Mobility Architect Designed By: Brent Gleadle CANWIN STUDIOS About Centric Consulting Centric Consulting is a business consulting and technology solutions firm providing full-service management consulting services. Centric s expert consultants help clients tackle their toughest business and technology challenges with innovative, balanced and measureable solutions. Centric believes mobile is the future of computing and Mobility Solutions is one of our fastest-growing service offerings. Centric helps companies of all sizes get started in mobile computing, re-imagine user experiences with technology and extend back-end systems to today s most relevant mobile platforms. Centric was founded in 1999 and is a privately owned company. Learn more at Contact Centric to learn more In Balance 29