Canadian startup mutualizes iBeacon deployment costs
While the sensor-type Bluetooth Smart devices can indoubtedly answer specific needs, consumers will certainly be less receptive to iBeacon-type in-store messaging and micro-geolocalized marketing (see Hold back your high tech marketing tactics! ).
The invasiveness of Bluetooth Smart beacons may be felt even more strongly if shoppers are asked to download the app of every shop they visit.
This is the pitch of Canadian startup, Reteneo, who designed its ‘Puck’ as a stripped-down iOS and Android-compatible beacon platform to allow multiple retailers and merchants to offer beacon-based services to consumers via a single ‘Reteneo Life’ app instead of having to download a separate app for each beacon.
For as low as $15 per month, retailers will be able to ping their visitors, without collecting their personal info nor asking them to register, all the set-up, programming and maintenance being centralized and performed remotely by Reteneo.
Included in the subscription fee, the company will also replace defective any beacon with failing batteries (on two watch batteries, those will run for an average of two years in continuous operation, claims the manufacturer).
"We can foresee a day where every retailer or merchant has beacons, but we cannot foresee a day where consumers are willing to have hundreds of different beacon-compatible apps on their smartphones," explains Cesar Rego, CEO of Reteneo in a joint statement with Nordic Semiconductor, provider of the nRF51822 radio SoC.
"It’s never going to happen given that people are already complaining that they have too many apps on their smartphones as it is."
In operation the Reteneo Pucks continuously advertise their presence to any passing iOS or Android Bluetooth Smart Ready smartphone within a range of up to 100m. Once the Reteneo Life app is running on the device, it reads this advertised ‘feed’ and contacts a cloud database and asks if there are any current offers or promotions attached.
If the answer is ‘yes’ the app then checks with end user’s stated in-app preferences to see if the offer is something the end-user has expressed an interest in. If it is, the user will be immediately alerted of the offer via the app.
There is no geo-tagging of the end-users, the beacons’ fixed position will only allow the units to bring relevant localized offers, without any further tracking.
According to Rego, the iBeacon alternatives out there are more expensive and recquire too much development for what most retailers are prepared to pay just to try the technology.
Well, this is probably not the view of Polish startup Estimote who has just released sub-$10 beacon stickers (3mm thin) with built-in accelerometers and temperature sensors.
Those are designed to be stuck on everyday nearby objects (that Estimote calls ‘nearables’) to provide contextual and microlocation data to smartphone apps.
Context-aware apps can be built using the accompanying software development kit. For the future, Estimote’s Co-Founder and Senior VP of Business Steve Cheney sees clouds of beacon stickers enabling smartphones to recognize their immediate surroundings and interact with a whole new class of apps.
Visit Reteneo at www.reteneo.com
Visit Estimote at www.estimote.com
Visit Nordic Semiconductor at www.nordicsemi.com
Related articles:
Apple’s iBeacon to propel micro-location revolution
Hold back your high tech marketing tactics!
Surfing on Apple’s iBeacon wave: Nordic’s Bluetooth Smart Beacon Kit
Texas Instruments bets on iBeacons with reference designs
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