Abstract
The emergence of beacon networks may be the most significant factor in the success of businesses fighting to succeed in the beacosystem.
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Notes
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President Dwight D. Eisenhower received credit for his key part in the building of the U.S. Interstate Highway system, as he presided over much of its construction and grew the scope of the project. His insight into the military applications of an Interstate Highway System allowed the scope of FDR’s original vision to be greatly expanded. FDR proposed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, which was a study to investigate its construction. This was a works project that had to wait until after World War II before it started in earnest.
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A Federal Joint Board on Interstate Highways was formed to standardize the naming of highways and the signage, which, prior to 1925, were named by individual associations trying to attract drivers to use the roads they had built. Names and signs varied to the extent that even professional drivers would frequently get lost and confused.
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Beacons owned by firms that they doesn’t already have a data sharing agreement with.
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Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, or improving your situation by your own efforts, is a figure of speech used as early as the 1922 when James Joyce referenced it obliquely in his book Ulysses. It was then adopted as a metaphor when describing the way that computers start up, with a sequence of small programs that invoke larger executables and higher-level functions, until the whole operating system is initialized, running and ready to do work. Since then, it has entered the business vernacular, with association to lean startups that build their businesses without borrowing large amounts of capital from venture capitalists.
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“White Elephant: Something that requires a lot of care and money and that gives little profit or enjoyment.” – Merriam Webster Dictionary. White (Albino) elephants were said to be a status symbol for the kings of Siam (Thailand); they were rare and expensive. P.T. Barnham was said to have been very disappointed after spending lots of time and money to acquire a real white elephant for his circus. It turned out to be far from a crowd pleaser (maybe because it was actually grey and spotty). The resulting financial burden he suffered may account for the origin of the expression.
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BREW stands for Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless. It included a set of cross-platform APIs that ran on phones as well as the app store platform that merchandised, sold, and delivered the apps over the air. An entire division (Qualcomm Internet Solutions) grew up to manage a huge ecosystem of BREW developers, wireless service providers, and the handset providers that were mandated to support the BREW APIs. If the parties at the BREW Developer Conference were anything to go by, it was a profitable business. One year, entertainment was provided by the Goo Goo Dolls on the deck of the USS Midway Aircraft Carrier moored in San Diego. The point being, these kinds of ecosystems can be lucrative.
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The company is now part of Intersection, a merger of Titan and Control Group.
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Gamification is the introduction of game mechanics into applications that are not ordinarily considered to be games. Techniques include awarding points to encourage desired behaviors, awarding badges to associate status with certain desired actions, leader boards to instill a sense of competition, and progress bars to nudge people to complete a set of tasks.
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No survival guide would be complete without a quote from Monty Python, so we borrowed this turn of phrase. However, despite numerous quotes in newspapers attributing the phrase “bleeding obvious” to that esteemed comedy troupe, during our routine fact check we searched the Python scripts and couldn’t find that expletive being paired with the word “obvious” anywhere. As it turns out, the phrase comes from John Cleese’s Fawlty Towers, from the episode Basil the Rat “Can't we get you on Mastermind, Sybil? Next contestant: Mrs. Sybil Fawlty from Torquay. Specialist subject: the bleeding obvious.”
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An endcap is a display at the end of the aisle in the store. This is some of the most valuable space in the store. Traditionally, brands would pay in some way for access to this space. This payment may be in the form of cash payments, up to tens or hundreds of dollars per day per store, exclusive access to the product, or a lower wholesale price that yields larger profit margins.
Figure 13-21. 
inMarket’s Retailer facing dashboard
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As a pioneer of the department store, Wanamaker’s price tags were part of a movement to setting fixed prices for products and helped curtail the practice of haggling over price. www.pbs.org/wgbh/theymadeamerica/whomade/wanamaker_hi.html
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Bubbly provides a self-service kiosk with a space-age design, plus beacon-enabled point of sale and vending. See www.bubblygroup.com .
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Intent to purchase can be measured with beacons by measuring dwell time at a certain kind of merchant or a department within a merchant’s store. Similar to our intent to buy a TV example, a particularly valuable example is intent to buy a car, which can be detected by beacons at a car show room. If an app user is seen spending time at car show rooms, they probably have intent to buy a car. Given the cost of cars, this is a lucrative use-case to focus on.
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Attribution can be measured if an offer for a product at a store is presented to an app user and they then visit the store as measured by the beacon within an agreed period of time—36 hours, for example.
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As has been noted elsewhere, the author has had a role in helping to create Proxbook, producing its predecessor—a simple WordPress database—as a companion to this book and has consulted with and advised Unacast.
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© 2016 Stephen Statler
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Statler, S. (2016). Understanding Beacon Networks. In: Beacon Technologies. Apress, Berkeley, CA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-1889-1_13
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