Solving The In-Store Navigation Problem

As SKU noted last week, beacons and their application to retail are getting a lot of press these days – good and bad.

On the one hand there is a lot to love about the possibilities beacon technology potentially unlocks – better customer communication, smoother omnicommerce, enhanced in-store shopping.

On the other, the world at large is also easily turned off by the potential “abuses” with how beacons and the data they produce are used.

“Being tracked around the inside of a store like we’re mice in some kind of a neuropsychological testing maze is a little much,” Forbes contributor Gene Marks noted.

And that inherent tension — between the potential of doing something innovative and the strong possibility of muffing it up and alienating one’s customers — has kept beacon technology somewhat always on the verge of, but never quite achieving, that big breakthrough in the marketplace that makes them mainstream.

But don’t tell that to beacon tech firm Estimote. While they are far from the only firm playing in the beacon game, they seem to be the one to watch/catch. In the last 18 months, they’ve managed to attract 50k companies,worldwide, to their platform. One of them is that certain retailer HQ’d in Minneapolis with the red bullseye logo, Target. Estimote is reportedly the tech power behind Target’s big beacon expansion.

“You can do really interesting things with indoor location technology,” Estimote’s Co-Founder Steve Cheney told MPD CEO Karen Webster in a recent interview. “We in some ways see ourselves like Stripe in the early days when no one knew who they were — they didn’t have a ‘consumer’ brand yet. What they had was a really simple intuitive pitch to developers: ‘we’ll make it really easy for you to take a payment.’ And we had the same idea — we’ll make it really easy for developers to deploy a beacon.”

But how a user-merchant deploys that beacon, well that’s up to them, Cheney told Webster. Estimote’s approach to beacons is different from many players in that it is not a “top down” retail beacon platform that builds the beacons’ uses directly into the technology.

“What we are today is sort of a full stack technology company that is bringing together different elements — the beacon hardware, what happens in the cloud, what happens in the beacon itself, the firmware — and then, of course, the software that consumers have on their phone in the fork of the app from their favorite retailer.”

The concept, Cheney explained, is to create a complete infrastructure that developers can easily interact with and mold to their specific use cases. Estimote isn’t trying to build that killer beacon app – instead, it wants to be behind the toolkit that allows developers to build their own “killer app” customized to their specific use case.

That, Cheney noted, is what he believes gives Estimote a leg up in developing and eventually moving to distribute their own product.

“Because we amassed so many developers iterating on our stack, we could incorporate their feedback into the product and subsequent releases,” Cheney said. “We could fix bugs, and iterate more quickly than others that had good products and good ideas, but weren’t engaged with the people at the businesses who were trying to deploy the technology.”

Estimote has learned a lot as a result of those iterations, and distilled that learning into their release today of Estimote Indoor Location, Estimote Stickers, and Estimote Cloud.

“What you see in our technology is that it’s not just the beacon – our ability to offer the hyper-accurate tracking you see [in the video] is a combination of the raw data from the beacon and the data science where we can understand what the [consumer with the] phone is doing because our technology provides the relational data.”

And that relational data, Cheney explained, has a wide variety of applications.

“We have an on-demand company that delivers groceries – and their issue is how to improve the efficiencies of their workers. Their labor force – the shoppers – aren’t necessarily experts on grocery store layout, but the service found that using our indoor location service, shoppers could navigate through the store and compress the shopping time from 30 minutes to 10 minutes. Estimote’s beach platform basically allows crowdsourcing of in-store locations, which allows users to draw a digital footpath through the store.”

That’s just one example that Cheney said “blew his mind” since it makes that point that innovators will be the ones that make beacons useful to businesses and the customers of those businesses.

And, the use cases for retail are nearly limitless.

Cheney said that retailers can use the small and flexible beacon stickers (aka “nearables”) to mark certain products in the store they want to draw consumers to, or even engage in light gaming.

“You can imagine a Black Friday deal where a valuable item is placed in an unusual part of the store – a flat screen TV in the grocery section, for example. The reward for finding it is a sizable discount, and users who are plugged into the [retailer’s] app can use it to navigate to the item,” Cheney noted.

However, he also noted, the uses are also broader and more flexible. Hospitals, for example use nearables to keep track of expensive mobile medical equipment to make sure that those who need to use that equipment know where to find it.

“The indoor location problem is solvable,” Cheney told Webster, “and developing that solution has a wide array of uses. Our position has been to see how flexible a tool we could build — and how we could eventually launch that into a platform that works for a lot of potential use cases.”