“MaaS provides our customers with a true digital front door for their patients and staffs, either end-to-end as a complete turn-key solution off-the-shelf, or as software components and tools that they can license, incorporate and build on their own through convenient and frictionless Github downloads and a comprehensive learning management system known as the Phunware Phenom Certified Developer Program,” said Alan S. Knitowski, President, CEO and Co-Founder of Phunware. “Missed appointments cost the US healthcare system more than $150 billion every year, so we’re extremely excited to enable such a prominent, globally recognized healthcare organization to better manage their patient and clinician experience across more than 14 million square feet of facilities spread over a 40 block downtown metropolitan area.”

Read the full article from Proactive

The post Phunware Adds Top US Cancer Center as Mobile Digital Front Door Customer appeared first on Phunware.

“We recently announced a collaboration debut between Phunware and Cisco Webex called the On My Way mobile app portfolio for South by Southwest (SXSW) attendees in March in conjunction with the Cisco Innovation Hub at Capital Factory, where I’ll be discussing three-dimensional cognitive workspaces,” said Randall Crowder, COO of Phunware. “The Meraki Marketplace will now provide Phunware an important channel to thousands of Cisco Meraki customers across more than 100 countries worldwide who need the very best LBS solutions for their network environments without the risk of deploying unproven technology.”

Read the full article from Proactive

The post Phunware’s Location Based Services to be Featured in Cisco Meraki Marketplace appeared first on Phunware.

But AR is just one interesting technology. Shopping isn’t the only use case for mobile retailer tech. And a smart mobile strategy isn’t purely about the app. So what is it about then?

Smart mobile strategy is goal-oriented.

If you start by selecting your favorite shiny mobile use case, you’re putting the cart before the horse. Instead, you must start with your business objective in mind. For example, if you want to improve the shopper experience, there are multiple mobile use cases that can enable you to do so—and some of them are actually driven by mobile capabilities built to empower store associate’s, not the shopper’s.

How can both customer- and associate-facing apps enhance the shopper experience? Download our on-demand webinar, “Redefining Retail: Surprising Mobile Use Cases Keeping Retailers Competitive” to find out.

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Smart mobile strategy is platform-based and user-agnostic.

When it comes to mobile retailer tech, Software-as-a-Service mobile platforms provide strong, scalable backbone that is flexible enough to support a wide range of use cases for many different kinds of users, from customers to store employees to warehouse teams and even back-office staff. The app experience and capabilities may be different for different users—obviously, shoppers aren’t going to have the same mobile needs as store associates—but the underlying platform can and should be the same. This synergy enables integrated data collection and reporting across all user groups, rather than creating another set of silos.

Smart mobile strategy is integrated throughout the business.

When e-commerce first started, it was on its own little island, separate from the rest of store operations. Eventually, retailers realized that e-commerce had to be central to the business. More recently, many brands have thought of mobile as a channel, primarily residing under marketing’s umbrella. That’s starting to change as savvy retailers recognize that the best mobile approach eliminates siloes and affects every aspect of the business.

Roughly half of the retailers surveyed in Boston Retail Partners’ 2017 Digital Commerce Survey reported that they are aligning digital commerce initiatives with the store organization, overseen by a C-level exec who manages anything and everything affecting the customer experience. Because mobile uniquely affects not just marketing and revenue teams but also operations, facilities, fulfillment and even product, Phunware CEO Alan S. Knitowski would take this a step further. As he outlined last year, the companies seeing global success with mobile align their mobile application, media and data science teams under one leader who is responsible for all digital transformation across the organization and manages all of these groups as an integrated unit.

Retail’s mobile-first transformation is a marathon, not a sprint.

By taking an iterative, lifecycle-based approach to mobile, retailers can initiate a continuous cycle of positive change that moves them closer and closer to achieving their business goals.

Phunware has helped many of the largest brands in North America develop smart mobile strategies all across the app lifecycle, and retail is just one of our areas of expertise. Want to learn more? Check out our case study of a Fortune 500 department store to learn about how Phunware’s solution helped expand their use of mobile solutions to improve store productivity and employee performance.

DOWNLOAD THE CASE STUDY

The post Mobile Tech in Retail: Shiny Objects vs. Smart Strategy appeared first on Phunware.

Know what’s even smarter? Harnessing the unique capabilities of LED lighting to enable more than just the illumination of spaces—to improve business processes and customer engagement. Here’s how some forward-thinking companies are experimenting with smart lighting for indoor wayfinding and more.

Visible Light Communications: Morse Code Meets Smoke Signals Crossed with Wi-Fi

We’ve talked about using beacons and GPS to enable mobile indoor wayfinding and other location-based services. These different technologies provide different types of location data inputs that can be ingested by a platform (like Phunware’s) and turned into an app user’s location on a map, for example, or used to trigger a proximity-based marketing message.

To learn more, check out the eBook Location Technology 101: Understanding Bluetooth, Blue Dot, Geo-Fencing and More.

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All digital messages break down to 1s and 0s. With visible light communications (VLC), 1s and 0s are communicated as “on” and “off.” Because they’re built on semiconductors, LED light fixtures can be programmed to switch on and off in specific patterns so fast that the human eye can’t perceive any flickering. Light sensors—like the camera in your mobile phone—can perceive these patterns and decode / receive the digital message being sent. Smart software (again, like Phunware’s) can turn that digital message into a user experience.

VLC Is a Bright Idea for Indoor Mobile Wayfinding

In fact, wayfinding is one of the most exciting use cases for this technology. Here’s how it works.

• Company A updates its indoor lighting with an energy-efficient LED system, which uses VLC technology to pulse out a fast, unique “I am here” message.
• Company A’s mobile app includes indoor wayfinding. When the wayfinding feature is active, the app leverages the smartphone camera to detect VLC signals.
• The back-end mobile platform interprets each unique VLC signal to pinpoint where the app user is in relationship to the smart lighting system.
• The mobile app represents the user’s location visually on an indoor map and provides turn-by-turn navigation to the user’s destination.

LEDs provide extremely accurate location data for use in mobile wayfinding. The user’s device and position can be identified within one-tenth of a second and updated as often as five times per second. VLC-enabled LED lighting fixtures come in a range of sizes and styles, and can be installed as quickly and easily as traditional lighting fixtures. They represent a smart way to upgrade any facility’s lighting for both energy-efficiency and future mobile use cases.

Solving for the Pocket

VLC’s accuracy depends on a clear line of sight between the user’s device and the VLC module. If the user’s device is in a pocket, purse or messenger bag—or if the camera is temporarily tilted or blocked—location accuracy can be affected. Incorporating Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) physical or virtual beacons as part of the wayfinding solution provides a safety net for instances where devices may not be directly exposed to the LED light, with accuracy up to one meter.

Smart Lighting in More Ways Than One

A VLC-enabled LED lighting system, coupled with a location-enabled mobile solution, lays a foundation for multiple future use cases across every vertical. Mobile wayfinding is just the start—location analytics can help organizations understand consumers better and optimize operations. Mobile data can reveal where people congregate within a space, where bottlenecks occur, how long people stay at a given location and much more. These insights can be used to help shape facility design, streamline foot traffic and serve the public better.

To learn more, check out the eBook Mobile Data: the Missing Link in Your User Acquisition and Engagement Strategies.

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When you look farther along VLC’s trajectory, the potential gets even more exciting. Many experts believe “Li-Fi” (light fidelity) networks may complement or even replace Wi-Fi, offering data transfer rates of up to 224 gigabits per second with greater security and higher bandwidth. IEEC Spectrum, the world’s largest technical professional organization for the advancement of technology, likens Li-Fi with IoT (Internet of Things) applications: “We already have nearly all of the infrastructure in place to get it to work. LED lighting is prevalent, intelligent LED lighting is becoming more prevalent, and it’s all affordable and easy to install for consumers.”

Phunware’s mobile platform works as well with VLC as it does with beacons, GPS and Wi-Fi. In fact, Phunware recently partnered with Acuity Brands to provide a joint solution for a indoor wayfinding enabled by LED lighting. We’re offering a fantastic 90-day trial of this solution—get the details here.

The post Lighting the Way: How Smart Lighting Can Enable Indoor Wayfinding appeared first on Phunware.

The latest cool tech making new experiences possible in the mobile space is virtual BLE beacon technology, which essentially “virtualizes” physical beacons. Mobile platforms like Phunware use beacons as sensors to trigger all kinds of cool mobile experiences—from providing indoor blue dot navigation to sending you a personalized push notification with 25% off those boots you’ve been wanting when you’re just outside the shoe department.

A virtual BLE beacon is essentially an imaginary beacon that can do the same job as a real one. From a tech standpoint, the virtual beacon works differently than the physical one. From the marketer or user perspective, they’re the same. They can both be used to trigger engaging mobile experiences and to gather location, time and other contextual data that marketers can use to understand and target their audiences.

To learn more, check out the eBook Location Technology 101.

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Virtual Beacon Systems Are Easier to Install, Maintain and Manage

Physical beacons are awesome. They’re small and affordable, and they can be placed discreetly in any number of locations in a given environment. But like any physical device, they have to be installed and maintained by a person. Someone has to put them in place, change the batteries and move them around when needed.

Because multiple virtual beacons are enabled by one piece of hardware, however, they require installing and maintaining far fewer devices. The vast majority of the management and maintenance happens through a simple software dashboard. That saves time and hassle.

Virtual Beacon Systems Are Incredibly Flexible

You may not be able to stick a physical beacon on an incredibly high ceiling, but you sure can slap a virtual beacon up there. They can be added easily to an existing Wi-Fi infrastructure or physical beacon implementation. You can even create a hybrid solution that combines physical and virtual beacons to help balance costs.

Making Location-Enabled Experiences More Attainable and More Awesome

Flexibility and easy management mean that virtual BLE beacons bring location-enabled experiences within reach of more organizations—and more people. These same qualities make it viable to install more virtual than physical beacons in any given space. As a result, you get much greater accuracy and performance. And thanks to machine learning in the software backbone, the more a virtual beacon system works, the smarter and more accurate it becomes.

It’s Exciting Here at the Tipping Point

When people first got smartphones, nobody really imagined all of the different ways we’d use them—and there are still possibilities to uncover. As technology matured, use cases grew exponentially, and suddenly we don’t know what we’d do without our smartphones.

Virtual BLE beacon technology is poised to be the innovation that makes location-enabled mobile experiences ubiquitous. But for the average Joes and Janes among us, it might be hard to imagine all the ways organizations can use vBLE technology. Let’s take a look.

• A hospital nurse administrator could monitor and track every piece of valuable patient-care equipment that moves around departments—IV pumps, patient beds and more—right from her phone. She could know exactly where Doctor Adebayo is and how many minutes it’s going to take for her to get from the patient floor to the ICU. She could get an instant alert that Mr. Davis has been in recovery by himself for too long, and speed an assistant to make sure he’s all right.
• A regional outdoor store manager could quickly and easily move beacons around to gather data on shopper dwell time near a new display. When a seasonal summer department goes up, store marketers could install virtual beacons in the area to trigger highly targeted “Happy Camper” messages to shoppers right when they peer into that cool new tent, and trigger the mobile app to change over to a camping theme throughout. In the stockroom, temporary employees could use mobile to guide their re-stocking efforts, getting turn-by-turn navigation through the store and precisely to the exact rack where that flannel shirt needs to hang.
• An airport could install a dense array of virtual beacons to collect highly granular traffic data in baggage claim areas, leveraging all of that information to understand passenger traffic patterns in detail before a planned remodel. During the holidays, the airport could expand its beacon system throughout the terminal, enabling multiple marketing partnerships with retail and food / beverage concessionaires—and delighting app-using passengers with seasonal savings, or even a holiday-themed app scavenger hunt to help keep weary traveling families entertained.

These ideas are only a jumping-off point. As mobile continues to evolve and mature, location-enabled experiences and use cases will continue to expand. Personally, I can’t wait.

If you’d like to learn more about how connected mobile experiences are going to transform operations, management and the customer experience across verticals, watch our on-demand webinar “Mobile at the Intersection of Hardware and Software.”

GET THE WEBINAR

The post The No-Geek-Speak Lowdown On Virtual Beacons appeared first on Phunware.

Each Mist wireless access point includes an array of Virtual Bluetooth Low Energy (vBLE) beacons that give it hyperlocation capabilities. Because the access points are managed and enabled by the Mist Cloud, they have significant advantages over traditional battery-powered beacons. For companies looking to set up a new location infrastructure, Mist delivers the benefits of both Wi-Fi and BLE. Those with an existing Wi-Fi network can still use Mist’s vBLE devices to efficiently add location capabilities.

Why are virtual beacons exciting?

There are myriad location technologies, as we’ve explored before. Beacons are especially good for indoor short-range applications, such as indoor navigation and in-store proximity marketing. Instead of installing multiple small physical beacon devices, Mist’s virtualized solution enables businesses to create and “install” multiple beacon zones within any given floorplan using far fewer physical devices. And those devices can be managed and even repositioned with a few mouse clicks.

Ultimately, this technology makes beacon-enabled location services much more flexible, manageable and cost-effective, which means they’re a more viable option for more businesses and organizations.

Virtual beacons and the user experience

Combined with next-generation mobile apps (like the ones we build here at Phunware), virtual beacons will enable more businesses to take greater advantage of location and context. Instead of being limited to a beacon at the front door, for example, a store could implement multiple beacon zones to deliver context-appropriate messages and gather behavioral data via their customer mobile app. The store marketing team could even move those beacon zones around as seasonality and customer traffic patterns dictate.

I can see opportunities for virtual beacons across all kinds of industries, from healthcare to retail to airports, entertainment venues, museums, multi-unit residential properties and many more. For example, the next time I go to a convention like Cisco Live!, the Mist solution could be used to log me in to the conference’s wireless network, allow me to download the event app and prompt me to stop by the registration table (with turn-by-turn navigation).

There’s a great story about how Mist’s founders got their inspiration. As Julie Bort reported in Business Insider, CEO Sujai Hajela’s daughter wished there was a way for networks to “simply put information about wherever she was at her fingertips.” With virtual beacons, brands can not only make contextually-relevant information available, but create a contextually-relevant experience.

The post News from Cisco Live and Mist Systems: Virtual Beacons Are Here! appeared first on Phunware.

In reality, beacons have none of that capability.

A Beacon Is Not a Location-Tracking Device

A beacon is a small device that transmits an identifying code, essentially saying, “I’m here! I’m here! I’m here!” over and over, to any device that is programmed to listen. To interact with the beacon, a Bluetooth-enabled mobile device must be loaded with an application that will recognize the beacon’s code and trigger an interaction with the server. From there, the device and the server communicate—the beacon’s job is done.

Learn more in our eBook: Location Technology 101: Understanding Bluetooth, Blue Dot, Beacons, Geo-Fencing and More.

DOWNLOAD THE eBOOK

Power to the People

The power isn’t really in the beacon; the power is in the hands of the user.

When users download an application, they do so because they believe the application will benefit them in some way, either by entertaining them, giving them information or discounts, allowing them to connect or shop, or otherwise delivering content to them that they care about. They realize that in exchange for this benefit, they must allow the application to collect information about them—that’s how the application knows what content they care about. And of course, the brand benefits as well: it gains deeper insight into its users’ demographics and buying behavior. Beacons simply help make this exchange more relevant.

With beacons, brands can instantaneously reward users with relevant benefits. Imagine taking a trip to the museum:

1. Prior to arriving, the user downloads the museum application to his smartphone. The application asks for some identifying information and for permission to respond to Bluetooth signals.
2. Once the user arrives at the museum, the smartphone recognizes the Bluetooth ID emitted by a beacon near the museum entrance. The smartphone understands that this ID is for the museum application and wakes up that application on the user’s phone.
3. The museum application then sends a message welcoming the user to the museum. As the user moves through the museum, the application “hears” the call of the beacons placed at each exhibit. When the user comes within range of a beacon, the application sends detailed exhibit information directly to the user’s phone.
4. Finally, as the user leaves the museum, the beacon at the exit broadcasts a Bluetooth ID to the mobile phone. The phone sends a message to the user thanking him for his visit and a link encouraging him to support the museum with a donation or to return for the next big exhibit.
5. In this scenario, the Bluetooth beacon never tracked the user, nor did it transmit personal information. The beacon was only a signpost that made it possible for the application to provide the user with the location-specific benefits he requested. Personal information was always within the user’s control. Bluetooth communication was always within the user’s control.

Beacons Are Your Friend, and Friends Respect Boundaries

All friendships require honest communication and boundaries. Bluetooth beacons are no different. They can only communicate with users when they are enabled, and they only communicate to the relevant application. Beacons are the best kind of friend because the user sets the boundaries and the beacon is happy to comply.

For more information about how enterprises across industries are using mobile software and location-enabled hardware to enhance the customer experience, download our on-demand webinar: Mobile at the Intersection of Hardware and Software.

WATCH THE ON-DEMAND WEBINAR

The post Can I Trust Beacons? appeared first on Phunware.

Over the past few months, there has been a lot of debate taking place around beacon technology. Of course, Apple ignited the discussion with the unveiling of iBeacon, which is designed to extend location services to iOS devices. In addition to beacons being rolled out in Apple stores, other retailers, including Macy’s, Kenneth Cole and American Eagle are testing the technology.

Yet many retailers still have not warmed up to beacons. Shopper sentiment and overall acceptance of the technology are two factors influencing lack of adoption, as some consumers are (rightfully) concerned about their privacy.

But the catalyst of beacons is that they can help retailers facilitate in-the-moment engagement with shoppers while they’re in a store and ready to buy. This not only piques interest, but also can help drive sales and ongoing engagement. After all, the easier you can make consumers’ lives, the more loyal they will be to your brand.

In a recent webinar during the weeklong Retail TouchPoints Connected Consumer Series digital event, Adam Silverman, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, indicated that location is going to be critical to the next-generation brick-and-mortar store.
Overall traffic in brick-and-mortar stores is declining worldwide, with 15% of all shopping malls going out of business.

But don’t panic!

“That doesn’t mean the store is going away,” Silverman explained. “It’s just that the role of the store is changing. The store needs to become more of a place of engagement with a greater focus on conversion. This is where beacon technology can help quite a bit.”

Beacon technology can offer context, personalization, insight, efficiency and differentiation to the brick-and-mortar experience. Placing censors throughout the store, retailers can “wake up” their branded mobile apps when consumers are in close proximity to a specific aisle, display or end cap.

Silverman explained that empowered buyers “demand a new level of customer obsession.” Because shoppers have fingertip access to more information than ever before, they expect retailers to go a step further, making all interactions highly relevant and tailored to their unique preferences.

Beacon technology can help you engage customers down to the department or aisle level. So if a customer is looking at shoes, you have the opportunity to initiate engagement and send her a 10% coupon on the latest line of sandals. Talk about a powerful incentive!

Full disclosure: I am a Millennial. My mobile device is glued to my hand at practically all times, and I’m always looking for the latest app to make my life a little bit easier. Yes, that means I’m also always looking for offers and deals that align with my wants and needs. So you could say that I’m the target audience for beacon marketing.

Although you may not be a Millennial, you may be the target audience for beacon marketing, too! Think about how many times you check your smartphone throughout the day, how many push notifications you receive or how often you tap into a device while you’re at home after a long day at work.

The bottom line is that if you’re a mobile-empowered consumer, you can get tremendous value out of beacon marketing.

The Benefits Of Beacons

Mobile devices are becoming the nucleus of our everyday lives! We need them, rely on them and simply gotta have them! It’s only right that retailers strive to meet shoppers’ needs on their device of choice while they’re at home, on the go and even venturing through a store.

With that, I’d like to outline what I believe are the top benefits of beacon marketing:

• Data security isn’t an issue: The greatest misconception of beacons, in my opinion, is that once a retailer rolls out the technology, consumers will be bombarded with messages they don’t want or need, and retailers will track their every move. Wrong. To participate, consumers need to opt in by turning on their Bluetooth and enabling location-based services. If shoppers don’t “raise their hand,” retailers can’t interact with them.
• Offers and interactions can be more relevant: Beacons turn on when an opted-in smartphone is nearby, which helps retailers better understand traffic patterns and dwell times throughout the store. Additionally, retailers have the ability to initiate engagement with these consumers while they’re looking at specific products, leading to more compelling and timely marketing tactics.
• Services and experiences can be improved: During the Connected Consumer Series webinar, Silverman noted that Aloft Hotels is in the process of testing beacons to unlock room doors. He added that there is potential for the technology to facilitate the check-in process, allowing customers to page representatives or check in using their mobile devices.

It is undeniable: We are living in the age of the empowered mobile consumer. Forrester Research supports this point, noting that many consumers are using smartphones in multiple locations throughout the day, including in the car (68%) and of course, in the store (68%). What are you doing to reach these consumers?

Although only 14% of executives who attended our beacon-themed webinar are currently using the technology, 67% are considering or planning to use it this year. That’s a lot of implementations on the horizon for 2014.

The post Why Retailers Should Bet on Beacons appeared first on Phunware.

While BLE (now called BlueTooth Smart) hardware beacons have been in the market for quite some time, the location-based marketing world shifted when Apple released a standard they call iBeacon. Apple’s beacon establishes an iOS friendly way BlueTooth Smart beacons communicate with Apple devices.

Beacons are quite simple to understand, and very powerful tools for real-time, digital engagement when paired with mobile applications on a consumers smartphone that are equipped to “hear” those beacons. Beacons are typically small plastic housings, often the size of a matchbook with a single beacon transmitter chip and a watch battery.

However, the iBeacon standard behavior is for a beacon to emit its own identifier several times a second, nothing more. Each iBeacon is then programmed with it’s own unique identifier and placed in key spots around a the interior of a building; on shelves within a retail store, in sections at a stadium or near exhibits at a museum. The venue applications are “virtually” endless.

Once the iBeacons are in place, a smartphone or tablet running iOS will then hear them as they announce themselves. In much the way the Doppler Effect works, approaching a beacon generally means the signal it emits is heard more clearly by the smartphone. A rich mobile application can then be programmed to know which iBeacons are associated with each real-world location. Each iBeacon essentially is a zone within a building, for example an iBeacon with identifier XYZ is determined to be located at the entrance to the women’s department within a store. That triggering event as a smartphone enters the women’s department beacon “zone” opens a world of possibilities for brands and advertisers including: sending greetings, messages or content to the smartphone upon entry, hailing an associate to assist a customer in-aisle, lighting up nearby digital signage with personalized content, changing application behavior to turn on in-store shopping mode or influencing the mobile advertising the user will see.

Beyond the incredible new set of customer service, marketing and engagement possibilities for brands and advertisers as they look to leverage the ubiquity and personal access to opted-in consumers, there is an increasingly fragmented field of hardware and software providers popping up. One of today’s differentiators that beacon providers will present is proprietary beacons that do not follow the iBeacon standard.

While there are several reasons and benefits touted by the beacon manufacturers for going with a proprietary approach, ultimately this is not a good long-term solution. Issues could arise such as:

• The mobile rich application must carry a “ride along” set of software from the beacon manufacturer, called a Software Development Kit (SDK) which increases the size of the application that must be downloaded, stored and run on the consumer’s smartphone, taking up more space.
• Non-standard beacons cannot be heard and interpreted by iOS itself, meaning that the application must double the work of the OS by detecting, calculating and positioning itself, which increases processor load and drains the smartphone’s battery.
• Using open iBeacon-based standard beacons means you can source beacons from multiple vendors.
• Most important is that Apple expects the iBeacon standard to be followed. While this is speculation, past behavior from Apple predicts that the app-store approval process will reject applications that run proprietary beacon SDKs.

There are some risks with the current iBeacon standard. It is possible for someone to “spoof” an iBeacon capturing the beacon’s identifier, programming that id into another beacon they set up elsewhere and then triggering false entries from that remote location. This should be considered for any apps that will use the beacons to earn or offer items of value like loyalty points or prizes, or instant coupons. But beyond those considerations, the iBeacon standard is the safest bet for retailers, museums, airports and other facilities that want to take advantage of location’s power for consumer marketing and engagement.

The post The iBeacon Standard for Indoor Location Implementations appeared first on Phunware.