Five years ago, most messages popping up on the smartphone of a young person walking through a mall would be texts from friends urging a meet-up in the food court.
Today, it’s retailers who are triggering alerts on smartphones to grab the attention of shoppers. By deploying beacon technology on their premises, a shoe store can send messages to a passersby to let them know about, say, a sale on Nikes.
But Trent Shumay isn’t convinced the future of the small, mobile and relatively inexpensive beacon devices rests in the retail market.
“I think that people already get a lot of messages and a lot of advertising; I don’t think most consumers crave more of that,” the chief technology officer of IoT Design Shop (IoTDS) said.
Rather, it’s the slowly emerging consumer market the Vancouver-based company wants a piece of.
IoTDS originally began developing the devices, which use Bluetooth connections to set off alerts on mobile devices,specifically for retailers.
However, “We were all using beacons just for fun stuff,” Shumay said, adding the development team ended up coming up with ideas they thought would be helpful in their day-to-day lives. For instance, a beacon inside the glovebox of Shumay’s car can detect his approach as he leaves his office and send a message to his smartphone asking if he wants to get the stereo pumping.
IoTDS launched a crowdfunding campaign last month for its new Signul beacon, to gauge how much interest there was for such consumer devices. Within three days, the campaign blew past its $25,000 goal.
Shumay said the campaign validated his belief the market for consumer beacons is ripe for the taking.
IoTDS is not alone in anticipating a growing demand for the technology.
A July report from ABI Research anticipated 60 million beacons would be shipped over the next five years as the market expands beyond retail space.
“In building terms, many stores are relatively small in comparison to a corporate office or hospital, while the items being tracked, i.e. consumers, are already BLE [Bluetooth low energy]-enabled through their smartphones, further limiting the number of beacons required,” analyst Patrick Connolly said in the report.
And in 2013, Apple (Nasdaq:AAPL) unveiled its own beacon technology, calling it iBeacon. Virgin Atlantic began running tests earlier this year at London Heathrow Airport using iBeacon to trigger mobile boarding passes on people’s smartphones as they approached security gates.
But the ABI Research report cautioned that the margin on basic beacons is likely to shrink in coming years as both startups such as IoTDS and major companies such as Apple compete to capitalize on the technology.
The Signul beacons run for $50 a piece and are assembled in B.C. – for now. Shipping costs within and from Canada range from $8 to $19, posing somewhat of a challenge for IoTDS.
Shumay said there may come a time when the company will have to use a third-party fulfilment centre to ship orders to the U.S. and Europe.
For now, he said, IoTDS is relying on demand in both the consumer and retail markets.
The commercial devices are more configurable than the consumer beacons, allowing businesses to build and tailor their own apps. Anyone buying the consumer-oriented Signul beacon would get a free app already configured to complete certain tasks.
“Home automation is going to be the other sort of big application for beacons because most people have their phone with them almost at all times and get kind of stressed out if they don’t,” Shumay said.
“Being able to automate security and safety and lights based on the presence of your phone is going to make a big impact.”
