How Apple iBeacon Will Transform Local Commerce

One fascinating benefit of today’s converged hardware / software platforms is how a new technology can be “turned on” via OS upgrades, allowing instant network effects at the platform and ecosystem level. Apple’s iBeacon is a model case for this and below are some thoughts on how new capabilities brought forth in iOS7 have the power to transform local and retail at the point of sale.

1. iBeacon was announced at Apple’s WWDC in June and is part of iOS7. The magic of Apple iBeacon stems from it being an open standard—Bluetooth 4.0 (BTE) has been inside most smartphones for 2+ years (for Apple, dating to the IPhone 4S). Bluetooth chips have grown leaps and bounds in terms of capabilities and efficiency in recent years and will continue to get smaller and cheaper. Today, a beacon can last 2 years with a low power ARM processor running on a watch battery, even when the device is constantly broadcasting to everyone around it.
2. Beacons can take any form factor and can be placed anywhere. From a developer perspective, they simply advertise data in peripheral mode by broadcasting a unique identifier. App developers then use this to understand the location of your device and connect you to a service or to content in the cloud.  Apple integrates iBeacon into CoreLocation (nothing to do with the old Core Bluetooth framework).  Beacons sit back and broadcast. The discovery, handshaking and communication are all handled by Apple.
3. People compare Bluetooth and the now-defunct NFC—but use-cases like range sensing show how superior Bluetooth is and why Apple chose it. BTE also has forward proofing built in—today’s chips are so advanced they have built-in support for over the air (OTA) firmware updates.1. This is a big deal and means beacons can be updated  after being deployed. New firmware can be broadcast to the beacon to enable things like battery saving intelligence—e.g, it’s possible to turn off a beacon at night (if inside a store) to make the battery last longer, or download system upgrades and security patches.
4. Additionally BTE allows the concept of ranges—near, medium, and far under iBeacon.  This enables distinctions to be made based on distance, enabling both geofences as well as true proximity-based services (touching your iPhone against something). iBeacon and Bluetooth will enable geofencing that is much more granular than today’s location technologies (GPS + WiFi). But another of the less talked about use-cases that is super compelling is indoor navigation.
5. Retailers will be able to easily arrange multiple beacons (3 or more) to do triangulation. This allows rough indoor navigation for less than $100 today (much less in the future). Why would retailers not consider deploying beacons when every single person with an iPhone can be marketed to?2 Indoor navigation is very interesting to Google, and they have been playing with indoor Maps for years. So—though beacons are more about proximity and context than trying to locate position precisely, both may be interesting to Apple and Google for different reasons.
6. Indoor navigation can go way beyond traditional geofencing, which simply senses presence—for example, placing  15 beacons every 10 feet apart could create a mesh network, with each beacon transferring different IDs to the phone and to each other. This would allow the network to detect you with a high level of precision indoors. One of the keys for using beacons like this will reside in being able to update them after deployment to a later firmware via OTA updates. Market leaders like Estimote are already thinking this far ahead, so deployments made today can be extended for years as new software features are devised at the app layer.
7. Getting all this to work will require a lot of thought at the platform level, which is why Apple has a big edge. iOS can allow you to use CoreLocation to wake up the app with WiFi and GPS, and then the app will discover nearby beacons, at which point they will communicate with the app / user directly—so the app won’t stay in the background wasting power (iBeacon can wake up apps but only after beacons have registered). Apple also has a new framework called  CoreMotion that takes advantage of the M7 processor to do granular level precision. Android will struggle wildly to get this level of control neatly exposed for developers. Because consumers don’t want apps to just ping their phone, and because location services are battery killers, a neatly exposed developer toolkit is crucial—devs aren’t going to adopt iBeacon unless consumers see the value and their smartphone batteries don’t die. When used in unison, all of Apple’s APIs will really propel developers to build creative things. MLB recently deployed a trialbased on iBeacon which showed ticket-holders a map to their exact seats once they’d entered the park—amazing.
8. Interestingly, Apple’s push into iBeacon could enable it to run away in this market while still standardizing on a completely open platform and developer environment. Apple often gets wrongly derided for being closed—but as I mentioned in point #7 in this post on iOS and Android, fragmentation issues in Android will guarantee that only a minority of Android phones (best estimate is 30%) will support a beacon-like system 12-18 month from now. This is bad for Android, but Apple didn’t have to do anything “closed” to create this gap—iBeacon is standardized around 100% open technologies.
9. All this begs the question—does Apple have a local strategy? In my opinion, yes. And does this strategy have the capability to change the way merchants think about local? Yes. iOS7 and iBeacon create an ecosystem-wide network effect overnight, with standard technology, offered in an open development environment.  It’s very clear that Apple is starting to put the pieces together to allow consumers to make offline transactions with their device—imagine being in a store and authorizing a payment with your fingerprint and never talking to a salesperson. All Apple has to do is open its payment APIs to get to this level, the rest of the stack is already being exposed.
10. It’s a sure thing that retail will transform over the next few years with the help of mobile platforms. Apple and Google will push these technologies. And developers will embrace them. Proprietary solutions will go away. Google already backed away from NFC. Another example of this is Shopkick. They were early with a proprietary solution that has seen success, but iBeacon will eclipse this almost immediately. Retailers won’t use Shopkick because they can integrate iBeacon into their own apps, and the company will have to adopt to this technology or be left behind.

Overall, one thing is clear: mobile platforms are set to change the way we buy, transact and consume in our local environment.  Local commerce is a massive carrot for growth, a $1 trillion opportunity in the US alone. And somewhat ironically, it may end up being Apple’s “closed platform” which helps unify how online to offline commerce evolves, while fragmentation within Android actually slows adoption of these technologies down.

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1. Broadcom, the company with the biggest leadership position in Bluetooth, is one of the top SoC companies in the world and understands networking deeply. They exemplify how the intersection of embedded networking and mobile technologies have accelerated mobile platform innovation at a velocity past anything that PCs / traditional computing ever witnessed ↩

2. opt-in only, and dependent on the consumer downloading and authorizing an app. ↩

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How I Taught Steve Jobs To Put Design First

HARTMUT ESSLINGER, FOUNDER OF FROG AND CREATOR OF APPLE’S SNOW WHITE DESIGN LANGUAGE, RECOUNTS CONVINCING JOBS TO EMPOWER DESIGNERS.

My first encounter with Apple was at the ICSID World Design Congress in Helsinki in 1978, where the company had installed a working Apple IIe system. I liked Apple’s technology and price and how well these rudimentary products worked. Apple’s funny rainbow logo had the words “apple computer” scrawled across in an ugly typeface. As for product design, it looked like a clunky old typewriter without its ribbon and roller, and the keyboard stood at a wildly non-ergonomic height above the desktop. Two primitive 5 ¼–inch floppy disk drives made of generic sheet metal rested on top of the computer case, capped by an off-the-shelf Japanese monitor that displayed green characters on a black background. The Apple IIe clearly fell short of a grand vision, but I decided to buy one anyway. And as I played with my nice toy it dawned on me that computers—or “thinking machines”—were destined to enter our daily lives.

ON THE ROAD TO APPLE

My major consumer tech client at the time was Sony, which I believed had the technology to expand into personal computers. But after developing a few prototypes with Sony engineers, it was clear by 1981 that management wasn’t interested. I turned my attention to Silicon Valley: HP, for example, with its technologically advanced products, seemed to be a logical choice. Yet I eventually realized that HP’s DNA simply didn’t allow for introducing human-centered design to technology products. At that point I knew I had to get in touch with Apple.

That happened in an unusual way. In early 1982 I was in California talking to designers who might be interested in working with me. The meetings didn’t go anywhere, but the discussions brought home the realization that most designers in U.S. companies were in-house employees who reported to managers in marketing and engineering. Then one day I was at a party in Silicon Valley and met Rob Gemmell, the Chief Designer of the Apple II Division. After showing him my visual materials, Rob said, “You have to meet Steve Jobs. He is this crazy guy, but he really cares about world-class design and wants to bring it to Apple.” 

THE REAL JOURNEY BEGINS

Rob visited our studio in Germany’s Black Forest and described a competition Apple was organizing between design agencies—which was fine with me. I was already convinced that working with Apple might be a life-changing opportunity for me. I clearly recognized the huge gap between the reality of Apple’s current products and Steve Jobs’ ambition to make his company “the world’s best.” We agreed that on my next trip to the U.S. I would visit Apple’s offices in Cupertino and meet Steve Jobs, who by coincidence would soon appear on the cover of TIME magazine with the headline “Striking It Rich.”

As I prepared for the meeting, I wondered what this mercurial man would be like and if he’d quickly kick me out of his office, as I had been warned. While waiting to see him, a rather formally dressed man came out of his office; this made me uneasy because I was clad in jeans, sneakers and a t-shirt. But when Steve emerged I noticed that his t-shirt was even older than mine. The previous visitor, Steve told me with a laugh, was California Governor Jerry Brown. “He’s looking for a job,” Jobs joked.

STEVE DIDN’T REALLY KNOW MUCH ABOUT DESIGN, BUT HE LIKED GERMAN CARS.

That broke the ice, and I showed Steve some of my work, emphasizing the products I’d designed for WEGA and Sony. Almost immediately he said, “I want this for Apple.” We also spoke about process. I explained that to make design a core element of Apple’s corporate strategy, it would have to be seen as a leadership issue; world-class design can’t work its way up from the bottom, watered down by the motivations and egos of every layer of management it passes through. I also offered a number of examples of corporate designers—especially in the United States—who were being compromised by the need to report to lower levels. Steve looked a bit irritated when I told him that my initial observations of Apple’s design process revealed exactly the same pattern of structurally determined mediocrity.

That wasn’t the only strained moment of our conversation that day. Steve seemed astonished that I spent less time talking about my projects than I spent describing the objectives, goals, and processes of my approach to design, including my experiences navigating power struggles within my client’s companies— most of which resulted in very successful products. He seemed mildly uncomfortable with the idea that a design language isn’t universal or absolute but needs to be right for the spirit of a company, and I saw him frown when I said that aesthetics evoke emotions but are just one of the elements of a great product.

In fact, Steve didn’t really know much about design, but he liked German cars. Leveraging that connection, I explained that design like that has to be a complete package, that it must express the product’s very soul; without the excellent driving experience and the history of stellar performance, a Porsche would be just another nice car—but it wouldn’t be a Porsche. We also discussed American design, and I offended him when I insisted that American computer and consumer electronics companies totally underestimated the taste of American consumers—Sony’s success with clean design being the proof. He was gracious enough to concede that Apple didn’t make the cut, but he also said that he was out to change all that, which was why he was looking for a world-class designer.

When I asked him about his bigger ambitions, he simply smiled and said: “First, I want to sell a million Macs. Then I want Apple to become the greatest company on earth.” For some strange reason, we both agreed that those goals were absolutely achievable.

I URGED STEVE TO RETHINK APPLE’S EXISTING DESIGN PROCESS AND THE WAY IT PLACED DESIGNERS AT THE MERCY OF ENGINEERING.

At the end of the meeting, I again urged Steve to rethink Apple’s existing design process and the way it placed designers at the mercy of engineering. I told him that, in my opinion, Apple needed one design leader and one team reporting directly to him, and design had to be involved years ahead of any actual product development in Apple’s strategic planning. With that framework in place, Apple could project new technologies and consumer interactions for years ahead, which would help avoid shortsighted ad-hoc developments.

Steve reluctantly promised that if frog won the competition, design would take a top position at Apple and report directly to him. I left his office that day feeling motivated and inspired, but also quite aware of the challenge we were taking on. My brief experience at Apple had convinced me that neither its division managers nor its designers would accept this change without a fight, and Steve had assured me the battle would be mine to win. Naturally, there were some points where we disagreed—Steve believed that “one insanely great product” would define Apple, whereas I insisted that Apple needed a comprehensive strategy that could generate a line of great products. But we launched a pivotal collaboration that day, creating what would become one of the most successful and influential designer/entrepreneur alliances in the history of consumer technology.

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“We’re Not in the Junk Business”

Cook, Ive, and Federighi on the New IPhone and Apple’s Once and Future Strategy – Businessweek: “To Cook, the mobile industry doesn’t race to the bottom, it splits. One part does indeed go cheap, with commoditized products that compete on little more than price. ‘There’s always a large junk part of the market,’ he says. ‘We’re not in the junk business.’ The upper end of the industry justifies its higher prices with greater value. ‘There’s a segment of the market that really wants a product that does a lot for them, and I want to compete like crazy for those customers,’ he says. ‘I’m not going to lose sleep over that other market, because it’s just not who we are. Fortunately, both of these markets are so big, and there’s so many people that care and want a great experience from their phone or their tablet, that Apple can have a really good business.’”

(via. Business Insider)

This quote from Cook describes our philosophy at Bombing Brain to a T. This is why we don’t care about top paid charts, going freemium, or getting more “installs.” We charge a relatively high but fair price for a product that appeals to the second of Cook’s “segments”. People who want to solve a specific problem and are willing to pay to have that problem solved.

I completely understand and respect those in software who want to attack that first segment. There’s a lot more money and potential to strike it rich over there, I’m quite sure. But there’s also a much better chance as a small indie that you’ll get crushed by the billion-dollar venture-backed companies that are dominating that space as well. Mostly, though, it’s just not a business in which I’m interested. I’d rather sell to customers who are more like me, because I understand their motivations and I know how to make them happy.

The dumbest thing you can do in life is assume that there’s one way to succeed at anything. Living your life via stats, following whatever “most” people are doing is a surefire way to die a mediocrity. 

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How much to make an App?
Estimate the cost of an app easily using this handy tool. http://howmuchtomakeanapp.com/

Painting robot by sonice development

Conceived with capabilities to crawl on interior walls, take walks on buildings and explore the city in a way humans can’t, the ‘vertwalker’ by berlin based creative studio sonice development is a robot that can easily maneuver on vertical surfaces. when equipped with a marker, the small device is transformed into a mechanized scaling painter that creates scattered lines across individual planes, producing one-of-a-kind large scale pieces of art. the robot is constructed with foam boards, sensors and custom electronics to help it move freely on any wall and is currently on display for the red never follows’ exhibition at the saatchi gallery london until september 1st 2013.

the vertwalker in action
images courtesy sonice development

vertwalker painting robot by sonice development
video courtesy sonice development

the mechanized scaling painter draws lines across individual planes

constructed with foam boards, sensors and custom electronics, it can easy maneuver on vertical surfaces

prototype views 

vertwalker detail

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Kinetic light art installation

A permanent kinetic light art installation, ‘m0za1que’ is featured on the main wall of the entrance hall at maison mecatronique, annecy-le-vieux, france. produced by belgium-based agency LAb[au] the piece relates motion with color through the phenomena of light. the 3.4m x 6m wall is divided into 26×15 squares, where each of the 390 tiles is motorized by a linear actuator with a 10cm range. the individually controlled motion system creates three-dimensional reliefs of geometric patterns, which evolve following the logic of cellular automata. during the day the programmed motifs draw black shadows, while in the evening colored shadows appear. three light-projectors in primary colors of red, green, and blue creates a uniform white illumination on the wall – the shadows in the tiles appear in the secondary colors of light. the colored illuminated surfaces appear and disappear according to the facade’s movement. 

m0za1que relates motion with color through the phenomena of light

the 3.4m x 6m wall is divided into 26×15 squares, each of the 390 tiles is motorized by a linear actuator

during the day the programmed motifs draw black shadows and in the evening colored shadows appear 

three light-projectors in primary colors of red, green, and blue creates a uniform white illumination on the wall

looking down onto the illuminated moving facade

the colored illuminated surfaces appear and disappear according to the facade’s movement

the individually controlled motion system creates three-dimensional reliefs of geometric patterns

m0za1que 15×26 is installed at the maison mecatronique, annecy-le-vieux, france

the wall without any illuminated light

detail of the m0za1que motors

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How Designers Destroyed the World. You are directly responsible for what you put into the world. Yet every day designers all over the world work on projects without giving any thought or consideration to the impact that work has on the world around them. This needs to change. Source

Share life in 3D with Seene. The world we live in isn’t flat, and with Seene, neither is the way you share it. Seene lets you take lifelike 3D photos and share this with other Seene users, on the web and via social networks. Source