Month: September 2018

The rectangle decade and the shape of the future

This year marks a decade of the smartphone ecosystem as we know it. While the original iPhone debuted in 2007, it was the introduction of the App Store with the iPhone 3G in 2008 that kicked off the era of a rectangle in every pocket.

Coincidentally, this month marks half a decade of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) as a meaningful addition to that ecosystem. Back in September of 2013, Apple introduced iBeacon with iOS 7, and we were quick to demonstrate the transformative potential of the technology (read this article and watch the video below) which surely contributed to our capture of the title “World’s Best Startup” two months later.

*Despite being hastily recorded, that video is still, by an order of magnitude, our most viewed!

Take a moment to recall your first smartphone, your first delightful experience, and the truly novel features you gained when upgrading to your second and perhaps even third. It’s not difficult to argue that there was genuine cause for excitement during that early period where smartphones and their apps had sparked symbiotic innovation on an unprecedented scale.

Now take a moment to recall your first smartphone with BLE (ex: iPhone 4S and beyond…).   Was your mind not blown?   Oh wait, it wasn’t?   You mean this didn’t change everything?

Back in 2013, we envisaged a second wave of symbiotic innovation, this one combining mobile apps with BLE’s connectionless discovery features. We saw iBeacon as a lighthouse in your pocket, making a bold prediction of social networking leading to the emergence of the IoT as your Brand Ambassador. That second wave of innovation sure has been long in the tooth! At this month’s Place Conference on location and proximity, mobile BLE was relegated to a cursory mention. Moreover, last week at Bluetooth World, a friend and long-time pioneer of mobile Bluetooth proximity experiences shared with us his concern that recent and upcoming Android updates are actually stifling mobile innovation with BLE, confirming our own observations of late.

You could say that Apple and Google really “blue” this opportunity.

Frankly, it has reached a point where it’s difficult not to argue that our clients in smart workplaces, our current top vertical, wouldn’t be better served distributing inexpensive BLE badges/tags to their associates rather than asking them to install an app that only offers competitive performance when operated in foreground, and requires costly development and maintenance. $500 rectangle meet $5 indeed! Sadly, that is where we collectively find ourselves five years on!

A few months ago we asked what’s Beyond People-as-a-Product. As the smartphone ecosystem joins the decade club, we should definitely ask what’s Beyond-the-Rectangle? Could Google’s aforementioned tinkering be in preparation for something revolutionary they have up their sleeve? Can Apple still surprise us and usher in a new era with an iSomething? Might even a nimble and disruptive outsider dislodge the pair?

An optimist has grounds to argue that the next big thing is coming. A pessimist has grounds to argue that the giants of mobile and social media are digging in their heels to defend their current business models as long as they can. Either way, one thing is for sure:

the rectangle had a good decade run, but it’s unlikely the shape of things to come.

Still Place for optimism?

Yesterday we attended our fourth Place Conference, held in NYC a little further uptown than our first Place back in 2014. Back then the conference had a strong focus on all the latest mobile location and proximity technologies that were expected to revitalise retail. There was an air of optimism around the Bluetooth beacon and similar innovations which held much promise to deliver delightful, contextual, brick-and-mortar experiences for a broad consumer base increasingly expecting personalisation.

At the 2018 edition, it didn’t take long to realise that this optimism had not simply faded, but completely vanished. The first and only mention of a beacon did not occur until the fourth presentation: a panel entitled What Nobody Will Tell You about Location Data. And what did the panel tell us?

Baseline location data is a commodity now.

Indeed, that fact was affirmed in the previous presentations and those to come. The state of the art in location analytics and proximity marketing has become the acquisition, interpretation and application of baseline location data from mobile phones.

Wait, what’s baseline location data and how is it obtained from mobile phones?

Curiously enough, that subject was never directly addressed. But in short, the primary data source consists of a latitude/longitude paired with a device identifier, gathered from mobile devices under their terms of service. These data points are enriched by companies who probabilistically associate the identifier with a household, demographic (or more!), and the geocoordinates with addresses and/or an individual’s journey. This commodity is then applied to business decisions or to pushing the right ad to the right consumer at the right time and place.

At least that’s how it’s supposed to work. Thomas Walle of Unacast made the precision (pun intended) that data quality is not yet a commodity. This was affirmed by the chief data scientist of Outfront, a leading out-of-home (OOH) media owner with countless digital billboards, questioning the reliability of “polygon visits” as source data based on his experience with multiple vendors.

Only two hours into the conference, as the panel progressed, I was already distraught, painfully reminded of the above slide which we had presented at a similar conference two years previous. Entrenched was the “old way” of bombarding the consumer to drive a response, the innovation being smarter bombs homing in on fainter signals. The term “surveillance” entered the discourse and was not outright dismissed. Were we collectively comfortable with that?

But, it all turned around when the panel was followed by a presentation entitled The Future of Digital Identity: Countdown to 2020 in which Neil Sweeney of Freckle IoT promptly declared that

a data revolution is coming.

Calling into question the status quo, he argued that there is currently an inverted value proposition for the consumer, progressive government regulation (GDPR in Europe and soon CCPA in the US) is becoming law, and scandals such as Cambridge Analytica have unveiled the uncomfortable truth behind advertising business models. In short, don’t expect our suggestion to Facebook following last year’s Place Conference to become a priority anytime soon!

What Neil proposed was a complete reversal of the flow of information and the ownership of personal data. And with the Killi app, he invited the audience to take the first step right then and there, opting in to select specific pieces of personal information that they would like to share with brands in exchange for money.

It was as if our complementary slide from that previous conference had suddenly appeared! Here was the consumer “advertising” their intent to brands and businesses through their presence and the information they chose to share, expecting an appropriately personalised response in return.

Since reelyActive’s founding in 2012, we’ve championed this paradigm for the flow of information. Coincidentally, our most watched video, in which we present this paradigm by reversing the flow of information of a beacon, will tomorrow celebrate its fifth anniversary! It’s not difficult to imagine this implemented in the Killi app to facilitate real-time hyperlocal exchanges of information like we demonstrated with our own reelyApp.

Whether a micro-DMP like Killi or rather a Bank of Personal Data will eventually prove to be successful is of course up for debate, as few attendees seemed threatened by the imminence of a data revolution. Nonetheless — and reassuringly — most attendees seemed to agree that such a paradigm, which fosters transparency and inclusivity and moves the industry Beyond People-as-a-Product, is much closer to being the right model, even if most would argue it is not yet a realistic model. In any case, the technology is ready. The trillion-dollar question is whether the vendors will ready themselves to flip if and when that critical time comes?