This technology initiative will enable hotels to engage with guests by offering promotions and other contextual notifications to their mobile devices when in the room. The service enables hotels to drive revenue by vastly improving the consumer journey, both inside and outside the hotel room.

“Thanks to smartphones, the hotel industry is in a period of tremendous change, and the way guests are engaging with hotels is undergoing a dramatic shift,” said Dave Weinstein, Kube Systems vice president.

“Advances in beacon technology (via Bluetooth low energy) are enabling hotels to know exactly where a guest is on property at any given moment – even inside the guestroom. With this level of intelligence, hotels can send contextualized messages to guests,” he continued.

“In many hotels today, when a guest walks past a beacon in a public area, he or she may be prompted to head to the lounge for a complimentary cocktail or stop in the restaurant for the nightly special,” Weinstein said.

“With Kube Essentials in the guestroom, the same messaging can be used to lure guests out of their rooms and spend money in other outlets. It can also push messaging that encourages the use of in-room services, such as in-room dining. Not only are we bringing location-based marketing services to the room, but it will give guests a place to charge ALL their mobile devices, including laptops. As more hotels invest in this technology, keeping guests’ mobile devices charged will be more important than ever.”

According to Hospitality Technology’s 2017 Customer Engagement Technology Study 21% of hotels are already using beacons, and an additional 44% plan to implement a location-based marketing strategy for customer engagement next year.

Location is Essential to Mobile Marketing

Kube Essentials is an all-in-one charging station with built-in cables, alarm clock and modular expansion options, including the ability to add the Gimbal Location SDK to its hospitality clients’ apps. Essentials is an affordable unit that still packs a punch with unmatched charging capabilities, versatility, and an engaging design. Kube Essentials charges ALL mobile electronics, including laptops with an AC power outlet. The option of a wireless Qi charging pad enables guests to “drop and charge” smartphones.

Kube Essentials ensures investment protection with built-in charging cables that are completely upgradeable to next-generation charging formats, including USB Type-C (reversible plug capability). As a clock, the LCD is large and easily seen from across the room. It features simple dimming controls, a straightforward alarm set, and snooze button. With a compact and sleek design, the unit won’t clutter the bedside table and blends with any guestroom decor.

Best of Breed Beacons

Since 2011, Gimbal has been helping brands across a range of industries reach their mobile advertising and marketing goals. In the hotel environment, Gimbal will deliver custom content to guests’ using a smart combination of mobile apps, beacons, and geofences.

“At Gimbal, we enable best-in-class location technology to power mobile marketing,” said Paul Malcangio, Gimbal Senior Director of Enterprise Sales. “Our goal through this partnership is to help hotel marketers communicate to specific individuals with contextually relevant messaging. By connecting to the hotel’s mobile app – which includes the Gimbal SDK inside the Kube Essentials solution – we can send targeted offers to guests that will enhance their stay experience.”

About Gimbal
Gimbal is a marketing and advertising automation platform powered by physical-world data. Using its own hardware and software, Gimbal enables brands, media agencies, and marketers to improve their campaigns and provides precise location data for logistics and asset tracking customers. Gimbal was recently named to the Inc. 5000 list as one of the fastest growing privately-held companies in the United States and operates offices out of Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, San Diego, and Chicago.

About Kube Systems
Kube Systems designs, manufactures, and markets unique technology solutions focused on the hospitality industry. Its solutions blend innovation with intuitive technology to enhance the guest experience. The Kube Systems suite of products combine the convenience of multi-device charging with portability, streaming audio playback and timekeeping. For more details on Kube Systems products, visit www.kubesystems.com.

The post Kube Systems Bring Gimbal Beacons to Hotel Guestrooms appeared first on Infillion.

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

The post Marrying LED Display with Beacons: Understanding the Customer appeared first on Infillion.

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.

Today, there are companies out there who are “war driving” physical locations and mapping out radio signals for finer-grade geolocation targeting. This has already been broadly done with Wi-Fi access point signals and cell towers, but now companies are trying to do the same by mapping out beacon signals and locations, which allows for a much more granular view.

Retailers have been early adopters of beacon technology. Business Intelligence estimates that 85% of the top 100 U.S. retailers will have tested or deployed beacons throughout their stores by 2016. This transformation occurring in retail is sparked by changing consumer habits. Particularly how shoppers now consult their smartphones for product info, ratings, price comparisons and more. On a high level, beacons offer a huge advantage to combat showrooming by proactively sending location-triggered information at the right time and place, thus eliminating the need for customers to look elsewhere for it. However, without necessary security features, third party apps can solicit a customer looking at a Samsung Smart TV in a retailers store, and instead lure them away with a cheaper, better offer.

Now in some cases the retailer may want a third party app such as RetailMeNot or Shazam to engage their customers in the store with location-triggered content in an effort to leverage massive audience size of these mobile apps. However, it is important for the retailer to have an easy way to control which beacons can be accessed by those apps and for what duration.

Sports and entertainment venues were also early to leverage beacons to enhance the fan’s in-venue experience with better location & proximity targeted messages and content. These venues are high value locations, which command premium rates from brands who are looking to sponsor and be associated with a team, league or venue. Venue owners are missing out on incremental revenue dollars if they deploy non-secure beacons that can be accessed by any application or advertiser. This not only runs the risk that fans will be receiving messages and brand offers from apps that aren’t compensating the venue owner or team, but that fans may be receiving illicit offers and content from businesses nearby. Or simply, all of these messages may inundate the attendee’s phone with too many irrelevant offers, causing discontentment.

Outdoor Advertising companies have also been early to embrace the beacon ecosystem as this provides them with the ability to bridge the physical and digital world while providing new ways to engage consumers with content and offers. Outdoor Advertising assets are typically deployed in high value locations and when paired with consumer lifestyle apps it provides a compelling new engagement tool for helping brands reach their target audiences and drive higher conversions, such as driving people into nearby retail locations. These Outdoor Advertising companies have invested millions of dollars to secure these locations.  Therefore, they need to be in control of determining which mobile applications are able to access their beacons and the flight time for when those apps will be engaging consumers. Deploying a non-secure beacon on these assets opens up for any mobile app to leverage for advertising or engaging users, while not compensating the beacon owner for providing such access.

There are many more scenarios that play-out with similar conclusions as to why secure access for beacons should be a priority for enterprises interested in the solution. Beacon use has proliferated across a broad range of verticals beyond the examples above and also include financial services, hospitality, industrial, smart city and many more. All of these verticals will face similar challenges on deciding whether to leave their beacon networks open or secure, however opting for a secure beacon ultimately allows for a more curated, controlled mobile experience for your customers. Regardless of the choice, Gimbal is ready to service customers with our industry leading location solution, including secure beacons.

The post Beacon Security – Why It Matters appeared first on Infillion.

Google announced today the release of Eddystone ephemeral /EID frames, which is designed for scenarios where beacon deployers want to manage access to the beacon signal, including privacy- and security-sensitive applications. We are pleased to announce that Gimbal has been classified with full support for Eddystone, including this latest release of Eddystone-EID.

As a leading solution for mobile engagement and location intelligence, Gimbal has always put privacy and security at the forefront of our solution.  We have been firm believers that beacon owners should have “digital ownership” of their beacons to control which applications are able to access their beacons.

We view Google’s continued investment in the beacon space as a further testament to the industrywide adoption of beacon technology and view it as one that will help accelerate growth across multiple industries looking to evolve their mobile offering to keep pace with ramping IoT expectations.

All Gimbal Proximity Beacons will be able to be configured to operate with Eddystone UID, TLM and URL packets today and EID frame type moving forward.

For more information on Google’s announcement, visit their blog post at: https://security.googleblog.com/2016/04/growing-eddystone-with-ephemeral-identifiers.html

The post Gimbal Supports Eddystone-EID from Google appeared first on Infillion.