The reach of beacons

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The reach of beacons
Since the rollout of the iBeacon protocol by Apple in the summer of 2013,
we have seen an expansive growth in the reach of beacons. In a partnership
with Glimworm, we will analyze beacon hardware, software, and potential
market to understand where the been and where it's going. Overall, there
will be about 4.5 million active beacons by year end 2018, with 3.5 million of
these in use by retailers. We're here to help you capture that opportunity.
First we’re going to discuss the market to understand how many customers
you can reach and what great case studies showcase beacon best practices.
Next, we’ll evaluate how software will allow you to engage customers at
retail, events, museums and more. Finally, we’ll evaluate iBeacon
hardware, bluetooth ranging, and general hardware basics like battery life.
Glimworm Beacons and Fosbury
Market
How many customers can you reach
Where is it being used (case studies)
Software
When can you reach customers
How can you reach customers
Hardware
Bluetooth ranging
Battery life

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Let’s dive into the market to understand the reach of beacons. As
mentioned in the introduction, there will be about 4.5 million active
beacons by year end 2018, with 3.5 million of these in use by retailers. The
majority of these beacons will be placed in dense, highly populated areas.
What does this mean for your business?
There is a clearly growing market opportunity, and you can choose to wait
until the market is mature, or get involved early and grow with it. Half of
the top 100 retailers in the U.S. are testing beacons this year, and we expect
them to have this new technology installed in one-third of their stores by
the end of 2015.
Whether you are in retail, live events, or hospitality, it’s important to
consider your goals. It may be increased customer service, engagement, or
revenue, but regardless it’s clear that mobile is going to be critical. So far,
the adoption of beacons has led to 16.5 times more mobile app usage
in-store and 6.4 times increase in mobile app user retention. Beacons can
help retailers attract users to their apps, retain those users, and increase
engagement on those apps.
Let’s dive a little into where it’s being used with two case studies:
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Market
Philips Museum
Recently, Glimworm helped develop an iBeacon enabled iPad game for the
Phillips Museum. They worked with exhibition and app designer, Northern
Light, who work with Museums all over the world to bridge the gap
between physical and virtual space. To see this live in action, check out the
video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gCoNKxp0Q8

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Glimworm Beacons and Fosbury
Heineken
Heineken is another great brand using beacons to advertise on mobile
devices. The Dutch brand currently sponsors some of the most popular
music festivals, and one large problem is that hundreds of thousands of
people get lost or separated from their friends. To help with this problem,
Glimworm has proposed a “find your friend” app to not only locate people
you know at a festival, but also give you more relevant information about
the venues, music, and schedule based on location. After leaving the
festival, Heineken has the ability to re-engage their customers, to offer
promotions, ask for feedback, or provide photos from the event.

Now that we’ve explored a few short case studies, lets conduct a micro level
analysis around the role of beacon software and hardware.
A good starting point for beacon software, is understanding that consumers
must first download software in the form of an app in order to receive a
beacon notification. This is actually a great thing because of privacy and
customer adoption. If a consumer walked through any mall, event, or shop,
and got hit up with thousands of messages on their personal device, they
would be quickly annoyed and mortified at their intrusion of privacy. In
turn they would be defensive to any messages at all, no matter how helpful
they may be. By protecting the customer’s privacy and experience, Apple is
thinking about how to best ensure long term adoption of technology.
Once a consumer has downloaded the app onto their phone, it can
recognize the reach of a beach signal in 3 distinct ranges. These include:
Immediate: Within a few centimeters
Near: Within a couple of meters
Far: Greater than 10 meters away
These ranges allow to you specify different customer experiences.
Immediate ranging might be useful if a customer walks in front of a
product and you want to show discounts or product reviews, where far
ranging might work well for welcoming people to your hotel or event.
So where do these notifications come from, and what is possible?
Notifications come from an app on a customer’s phone recognizing the
bluetooth signal and communicating the predesigned message. That
message is completely customizable, and each beacon can have its own
unique message. That way when a customer enters a store for the first
time, you can have a different message at the entrance than at the shoe
section.
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Software
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As a brand, you can then also control what happens when a customer opens
that notification by directing them to any website. If you’re in hospitality,
you may want a customer to swipe open the notification and be sent to a
review site like Trip Advisor or Yelp. If you’re a live event, you may want to
offer engaging video content. If you are a retail shop, you may just want to
provide discounts for customers.
After spending the time to reach out to your customers, it’s important to
understand how successful you’ve been. By using beacon technology inside
your app, analytics can show you the number of visitors that come into
your store, the number of notifications that are sent to those visitors, and
the number of experiences they interacted with.
To wrap up the reach of software, we’ve covered when and how beacons can
reach customers, and what is possible to do when developing beacon
campaigns.
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Glimworm Beacons and Fosbury
Hardware
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For those who are unfamiliar with the basics, beacons are always
transmitting bluetooth signals at varying frequencies, which can be
detected by software in two ways. These two detection styles are called
ranging and monitoring. When your IOS device is turned off or your app is
running in the background, you are in ranging mode, which means that
your app gets triggered when you go in and out of range of a beacon. In
some cases this can be 50-80m and if you configure beacons for close
range, it can be down to 5-10m. When you open the app in range, the app
can detect individual beacons where you can dive into some really cool
engagement tactics as previously described.
With bluetooth ranging both location and environment have a large
impact, and the best results we’ve seen come from putting your
installation up high. This prevents the bluetooth signal from having to pass
through bodies or other environmental barriers, and should be considered
during any implementation.
Another key issue in the beacon ecosphere is battery life. Glimworm
beacon’s battery lasts one year with default features, but there are a lot of
external and environmental issues that can affect this. To combat this, the
next generation of Glimworm’s beacons will be either battery or USB
powered.
BLE devices are getting stronger
and smaller, which is an
opportunity to embed beacon
technology into other solutions.
One of Glimworm’s design
principles was to allow the
removal of the circuit board from
the beacon’s casing. In the Philips
museum, their beacon technology
was built into exhibits as an
embedded device.

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Thanks for reading.
www.fosbury.co
drew@fosbury.co
+1 (512) 270-1512
www.glimwormbeacons.com
info@glimwormbeacons.com
+31 (20) 616 56 40
Glimworm Beacons and Fosbury
Please reach out to Glimworm or Fosbury with any questions.