Retailers and other consumer-facing businesses are just starting to get their heads around utilizing beacon technology and other location-sensing technologies to reach their customers at a particular time and place. But up to this point, leveraging beacon technology has been a one-way conversation, where companies sent out a message to the customer without a true understanding of how the message was received. This “conversation” usually occurs in the form of couponing. A customer walks into a store, the store’s beacon technology recognizes an SDK on a mobile phone, then calls to the cloud for a mobile marketing engagement. These mobile messages are very often used to drive in-store purchases through coupon delivery.

But, the use of beacon technology can be so much more, and beyond couponing, it can be used for analytics purposes or to create smart, seamless experiences. By marrying LED display technology, CMS and beacons, businesses can have a two-way conversation with their customers while learning more about them. NanoLumens has partnered with Gimbal, an industry leading location intelligence and mobile engagement platform, to fully maximize the potential of cutting-edge LED displays.

By embedding Gimbal’s top-flight beacon technology into our displays, the beacon can trigger the content on the display to change into a relevant message for that particular audience, allowing the display to communicate to the customer in front of it one-on-one.  This proximity location enablement is a true bridging of the divide between in-store and mobile, while allowing for an entirely new level of personalization.

Even if a retailer chooses not to change display content according to the customers nearby, beacon-enabled display technology offers a rich opportunity to learn more about them. Through beacon technology, a company can data mine information on every person who walks into a store. For example, a company may learn that a significant number of customers are sports fans or health food nuts. In addition to understanding store traffic, dwell times and more, this knowledge can be used by businesses to optimize physical locations in ways similar to their efforts in digital mediums.

Businesses can also take the information gleaned through the use of beacons to understand the customers’ journeys throughout their brick-and-mortar store. Do they tend to move through the space in a predictable pattern? Do they head right for the sale rack? This information can help a business better stage merchandise for increased conversions. The information can also be heat mapped for increased awareness of consumer behavior. Further, in the push to have Omni-channel strategies, these insights can be combined with other channels to have a more unified view of customers.

Businesses are just beginning to realize the possibilities of leveraging beacon technology in a way that provides a deep, rich understanding of customers and their preferences. The potential is limitless. Our partnership with Gimbal is on the forefront of maximizing these possibilities. To find out more about how NanoLumens LED displays, powered by Gimbal’s Bluetooth® beacon technology can improve your relationship with customers, please sign up for our free webinar, here.

https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/3057469532748828162

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Active vs Passive Use Cases

Active Use Case through NFC

One of the key differentiators with the technologies is that NFC requires a user (e.g., your shopper) to pull out their phone and “tap” it onto a NFC reader. In Gimbal-lingo, we refer to this as an “active” use case since it requires the end user to actively be using their smartphone before any activity can occur. One place you probably see this in use today is through mobile payment systems like ApplePay or SamsungPay.

Conversely, Bluetooth (in the form of our beacons) has the capability to be used in either “active” or “passive” modes. A “passive” mode refers to when a user has a locked device that is not in use, perhaps in a pocket or purse, and a notification or experience occurs. In addition to enabling your smartphone to pair with your wireless speakers, car and more, Bluetooth is also increasingly used to alert your smartphone to nearby happenings or offers in your proximity (whenever your smartphone comes into range with the Bluetooth signal). Our beacon solution has been meticulously engineered to allow you to engage with users whether they are “tapping” on a receiver (like with NFC), or up to 50 meters away. We do this by allowing you to change the signal strength of your beacons so you can create the user experience you have in mind.

Left: BLE in active (foreground) mode. Right: BLE in passive (background) mode

Let’s do a quick exercise to see which use cases you are more interested in, and as a result, what technology is a better fit. Imagine temporarily that you are an executive for a leading grocery store chain, tasked with updating your mobile app to keep up with changing consumer habits. You initially identify a handful of use cases that you want to integrate. In particular, you want to:

• Increase exposure: Highlight specials to nearby shoppers
• Surprise & Delight: Send users who spend a certain amount of time in an aisle a recipe with the other needed ingredients for the dish
• Improve Loyalty: Remind shoppers at checkout to use their loyalty card to continue accruing reward points
• Harness Data: Gain in-store analytics such as time spent in each aisle and part of the store
• Easier Payments: Allow mobile payments at the register

Can you guess which of these would be enabled through Bluetooth vs. NFC? In actuality, all but the mobile payments piece would likely require a Bluetooth beacon.

Summary

While NFC and BLE are both valuable technologies that will increasingly be leveraged to create more mobile-friendly experiences, we believe Bluetooth beacons offer unprecedented flexibility and opportunity for mobile-oriented organizations. Still have questions on how you can meet your proximity (and macro-location) needs? Contact us and get connected to industry experts.

The post NFC vs. BLE – Which is Right for You? appeared first on Infillion.

SAN DIEGO, CA ­- July 13 2016 – Gimbal, Inc., the leading enterprise-grade mobile engagement and location intelligence company, announced the public beta of its new Proximity Data Platform (PDP). Mobile app publishers that have incorporated Gimbal’s SDK can now access a free toolset to better understand and visualize their audiences in the physical world and to monetize their anonymized, opted-in data via premier partners including The Kochava Collective and Unacast. Perfect365, Scanlife and SnipSnap are just three of Gimbal’s customers that are already using Gimbal’s PDP to drive greater revenue and better consumer engagement.

Perfect365. “It empowers us to better understand our users’ behavior and go way beyond traditional geolocation insights by including a user’s indoor and outdoor journey. We are excited to use these unprecedented insights to improve our user engagement strategy and the contextual relevance of our app.”

Better, More-Accurate First Party Data
“Kochava is excited to partner with Gimbal as a data partner in the Collective and expand its mobile audience targeting capabilities with first-party proximity data. Unlike current data providers leveraging DSP bidstream data and server-to-server integrations with app publishers, Gimbal’s PDP provides direct, verifiable, first-party, proximity data leveraging their state-of-the-art SDK, including unlimited polygonal geofencing and industry-leading Bluetooth beacon technology,” said Kochava CEO, Charles Manning.

Availability and Information
The Proximity Data Platform public beta is available immediately and incorporates Gimbal’s leading location and proximity solution. You can learn more about how you may be able to leverage it here.

About Gimbal
Gimbal is the leading mobile engagement and location intelligence platform helping enterprises and mobile app publishers to understand and engage customers. Our platform combines macro-location geofences and micro-location beacons with a cloud-based solution to build, manage and analyze location-first mobile experiences. Working with marquee enterprises and mobile app publishers, Gimbal enables digital-style insights and engagement capabilities for physical places. Initially incubated within Qualcomm, Gimbal continues to innovate and invest in new ways to provide the best bridge between the physical and digital worlds. Visit http://www.infillion.wpengine.com/ for more information.

The post Gimbal Announces Proximity Data Platform for Mobile App Publishers appeared first on Infillion.

Welcome to the Connected-Event Experience

Gimbal has been behind the scenes at Cannes Lions Festival for the past 2 years, and 2016 is no different. With the ever increasing use of beacons for events and festivals, Gimbal has been helping lead event tech innovation with various app partners and solution providers.

Beyond the ability to message relevant content to users and help facilitate networking opportunities, Event operators now have previously unavailable insight on attendees by way of frequently visited locations, path trends and frequencies, as well as popular times for specific areas. All of this information greatly helps understand attendee behavior and optimize logistics and plans for subsequent events.

Combining Leading Solutions

This year at Cannes Lions Festival, Eventbase, the leader in event and festival app development, again has created a must have application for festival attendees. By using Gimbal beacons, they will be sending notifications with relevant and timely information about what’s going on around them through the official Cannes Lions app available on iOS and Android devices. The application uses a combination of Gimbal location data and Urban Airship for rich push and media, gaining those ever so valuable insights on attendee interactions with the festival.

Shazam being leveraged at Cannes Lions

Shazam this year is also jumping into the mix with the Sound of Cannes campaign, which will Shazam enable various locations through a combination of Sounds, Visuals and Beacons. This campaign will be making use of beacons in the Palais, the Carlton Terrace and the OMD Oasis.

Attendees will get a different experience depending on which location they’re “Shazaming”. Users will be able to see which tunes are trending, enter in sweepstakes for great prizes and find out how to get in touch to deliver similar experiences. See more about the Shazam Cannes experience at Cannes Lions 2016: A Coming Out Party for Shazam for Brands. With such and expansive mobile user base the opportunity to deliver content to a global user base has never been easier.

So if you’re at Cannes Lions Festival this week, keep an eye and your phone out for some great mobile experiences.

A Solution Built for Flexibility

Gimbal’s uniquely engineered beacon solutions enables multiple mobile apps, in this case the Cannes Lions festival app and the Shazam application, to interact with the same beacon or network of beacons serving a separate purpose to both. This doesn’t mean that the space is open for any app to access and activate. Instead, through Gimbal’s digital ownership capabilities, the event provider or beacon owner can manage which applications of interest are granted access making the “airspace” far more valuable for effective brands and agencies hoping to make the most of the technology and create a unique and valuable festival experience.

Gimbal Proximity Beacons

Attendees can expect more of these types of sponsored engagements at events and festivals moving forward. Where through applications like Shazam with very large monthly active user bases, event organizers can increase available inventory for brands and agencies on users/attendees devices and deliver exceptional digital experiences to keep people coming back.

The post Cannes Lions Powered by Gimbal Beacons for 3rd Year appeared first on Infillion.

Focus on the Forest Before the Trees

Location-based marketing has garnered significant attention in recent years and there are many technologies that have grabbed headlines: RFID, NFC, Bluetooth, GPS, the list goes on and on. While each of these technologies can be extremely valuable depending on the use cases you are trying to enable, we’ve found that many of our clients can most effectively accomplish their business objectives with geofencing. Our clients understand the value and importance of creating a mobile offering that leverages location, yet many of them focus on micro-location technologies without considering the larger (macro) part of the equation. Our advice you may ask? Focus on the “big picture” before you dive into the nitty-gritty.

As alluded to, geofencing is one of the best tools today for accomplishing many of the initial mobile location needs our customers face. Gimbal’s industry-leading geofencing features can be used in a multitude of ways such as letting loyal customers within a 2-mile radius know you have a physical location nearby, or that there is a special or sale. It could also be the ability to understand what locations have the most visitors and foot-traffic, enabling you to optimize the physical locations due to the new data and insights you’ve collected. The list of potential uses goes on and on, but the takeaway is the same: geofencing is a great way for you to begin engaging and understanding your mobile customers, before getting tied to solutions that require hardware and that need very precise placement and deployment strategies. Many of the location use cases our clients immediately want to implement can be achieved with a geofence strategy, so be sure you understand the capabilities of both before mapping out your organizations own implementation to ensure your success.

A Quick Lesson on Gimbal Geofencing

At a high-level, geofencing is a software based macro-location solution you can use to set virtual perimeters for the geographic areas you are interested in monitoring. This can include shopping malls, stores, or any outdoor space greater than 50 meters. Gimbal developed an innovative take on geofencing by allowing for many of the capabilities to occur server-side and in the background. Without getting too technical, this makes for a solution an enterprise can use to easily monitor and set up an unlimited amount of geofences, change the shape to circular and non-circular dimensions, and add or remove them without updating the mobile app in the app store. Further, unlike traditional client-side geofencing, this results in far less drain to a consumer’s smart phone while enabling the solution to run in both passive (background) and active (foreground) modes. This means you can have a rich in-app experience, wake a locked device with a notification, or passively collect behavioral location data whenever a virtual perimeter is breached. You can learn more about the differences of server-side and client-side geofencing here.

How Can I Use Gimbal for my Geofencing Needs?

Gimbal makes it easy to get up and going with geofencing in several ways. With our cloud-based management portal, you can easily begin setting up the Places you are interested in monitoring. You can upload CSV files, use APIs, manually select or use public geofences for places like libraries, parks and more. To actually engage with users of your mobile apps, you need to first integrate the Gimbal SDKs for Android or iOS. Once you do, you’ll be able to begin testing the value of location for yourself. Create a Gimbal Manager account here.

Summary

While location will increasingly become an integral part to mobile strategies, major enterprises need to take a step back and carefully consider which solutions are most appropriate for them (learn more about that here). More importantly, they need to adopt platforms that are flexible, scalable and secure, so whether they are starting with a handful of stores or are interested in nationwide deployments, they have a partner that can support their needs. Lastly, geofencing can be considered a great starting point before turning on the faucet and digesting more granular location data generated from our line-up of Bluetooth beacons. Begin by understanding the large picture, and then plan the strategy to deploy beacons to carry the torch for enabling in-venue experiences, increasing customer loyalty and improving mobile analytics.

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