Investment Tracker, October 22

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Beacons are the darling of commerce, with estimates of something like 30,000 of them in stores in the U.S. alone. The Beacon ecosystem ignited last year when Apple launched iBeacon, and ever since there has been a stampede of innovators and ideas beating a path to the doors of the brands, which see them as a way to talk to consumers during their path to purchase, hopefully to increase incremental sales along the way.

One of those innovators is Footmarks, a venture that got started with seed funding in January 2013 and just last week got a slug of money, $1.89 million of it, to further ignite its beacon business. Karen Webster, CEO of MPD, sat down with Todd Paris, president of Footmarks, who was in Singapore launching a big initiative with an ad agency that has relationships with tons of key brands, to discuss the current innovations Footmarks had to bring to the table and why the company caught the attention of investors.

A key differentiator for Footmarks is security for the data being sent by the beacons. “The idea of an open broadcast can be a little frightening to brands and to the owners of beacons,” Paris said. “If you’re a retailer and you put a beacon in your store, other people can see that beacon, and that can leave you subject to spoofing. And so we thought, let’s address that right off and let’s make sure that the end user can be highly secure in terms of our broadcast. So we’re watching out for the brand and for the end users themselves.”

Paris, the former GM of Microsoft’s Windows 8 Ads in Apps unit, is no stranger to advertising and media. That focus has turned out to be a really powerful channel for Footmarks. In fact, the Connected Devices Accelerator sponsored by interactive marketing agency R/GA is where Footmarks cut its teeth.

“Coming out of the accelerator we had of course matured a bit as a company, and we were able to use those connections out in the marketplace and start to benefit from that,” he said. “From there we moved into a more complete offering. So we really looked at having a end-to-end offering.”

End to end, in Paris and Footmark’s view, means everything from the beacon firmware and patent-pending security features, to a cross-platform set of SDKs, to cloud-based beacon management and setup, to building the content that will be delivered to consumers, and finally reporting, analytics and data visualization.

When asked about why the big check from his investors, Paris says that there was one key factor: They had clients and use cases to point to! The R/GA accelerator gave Footmarks a chance to not only develop their product but to do it with the input of key brands. “We did things right, based on the feedback we got early, and that was: Make it easy, make it simple and make sure the end consumer and their security is put right at the front,” Paris said.

The agency/brand relationship serves another purpose: It gives Footmarks a unique distribution model and an easy way to scale. Paris said, “From an investor perspective, one of the things that I really keep an eye on is the cost, the ability to proliferate SDKs and to get our technology out there and going through the agency/partner approach was the way we identified.”

Paris and Footmarks also recognize the wealth of data that beacons and beacon technology can deliver. “If you can apply the right metadata around physical locations, and you’re able to use the beacons to tell you who’s in your store, who’s in your physical space, then there’s this new layer and this new source of data,” he said. “We try to map the data across, into and associated with NFC and WiFi for a complete picture of who is around my location.” That makes it possible to build a beacon solution that delivers individualized offers, as opposed to beacons that just flash generic offers.

With the new round of funding, the company plans to expand its focus on analytics, hiring data scientists to improve tools for data mining and visualization, as well as enhancing customer support. “We really want to make sure we stay ahead of what our customers need,” Paris said. “It’s really about them and continuing to build out the platform.”