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Place Global |
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June 22, 2015 Issue |
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The Most Powerful Name In Corporate News and Information |
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Beacon Platform and Management System |
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CEO
Place Global
Interview conducted by: Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor, CEOCFO Magazine, Published – June 22, 2015
CEOCFO: Mr. Johnson, what is the concept and vision behind Place Global? Mr. Johnson: I was at the worldwide developer conference in San Francisco when Apple showed iBeacons to the developer community for the first time. I sat in that room and I thought this was going to change everything in terms of how we experience the world today. It was a new technology, and is a global emerging marketplace, so I felt like we had to have a service offering for this.
CEOCFO: What have you devised? Mr. Johnson: We took the platform approach. We did not set out to build an individual, vertical solution that would be constrained in any way. What we built was a global, scalable platform that would allow pretty much anybody to enter into the beacon economy and build a solution for their needs without having to hire programmers. We call this product PlaceBMS, our beacon management system and the beacon platform for everyone. We have also built complementary app technology for iOS and Android devices we call PlaceApp.
Mr. Johnson: Beacons are a near-field proximity technology. You have beacons, and they are little Bluetooth low-energy chips with an antenna and a battery. A beacon is tucked in some location and will pulse every second with a little bit of information. What happens is that as you approach it, your Android or iOS device knows that you are near it. Your device, based upon proximity to the beacon, can then take appropriate action. In the simplest model, if you are in a museum standing in front of one painting, your device gives you all the information about that painter with video and audio and robust information. You then move to the next painting, and it gives you information about that next painting and all the information related to that next painter. It is near-field proximity and Bluetooth low-energy so it takes minimal battery, and allows a user to move within a space and have a device know where you are within that space.
CEOCFO: Where are you in development of your platform? Mr. Johnson: We have 96 installations in 22 countries, and the PlaceApp is localized in 22 languages. We have been in beta since June of last year, and just finished our third revision of the product, which we launched as our official production release at the Internet of Things World show on May 12th. As I mentioned, it is a global solution. We have all kinds of clients in different countries with different use cases. For example, the JW Marriott in Denver uses it for their restaurant, at their concierge desk and in the lobby. They are also using it for an art tour within the building, within their events center and fitness center. In contrast, we have another client who uses the exact same PlaceBMS software in a Finnish school for the blind.
CEOCFO: What is involved with the set up process? Mr. Johnson: First, there is the beacon hardware. A customer can purchase PlaceBeacons or BYOB, bring your own beacons. On the PlaceBMS beacon management system side, each customer gets a private management website where the client controls the user experience for those beacons. We, or a distribution partner can help clients with their decision process on what kind of audio they might want, what kind of video they might want, what messaging, rotating schedules, menus, happy hour offers, and things like that. We will work with them to refine that content and then help them through bringing to life, basically. Signup is simple. Customers can order right on our placeglobal.com website.
CEOCFO: How did you reach out to get a diverse group to start with? Mr. Johnson: Beacon tech is a global emerging marketplace, and early on, we had registered the iBeacon YouTube channel. As we began to experiment with different aspects of the technology and its uses, we were putting that out on the web. As we learned, we were kind of letting people learn with us while we embarked on building our Place suite. We ended up receiving a number of inquiries that developed into testers and distribution partners on five continents. Those people who have opted in or have joined us are all early adopters and innovators within their own countries. They all have their own uses and their own clients. They wanted to bring this technology to their clients. As a result, we built a reseller, distributor and partner network for testing the Place suite of products.
CEOCFO: Why were you so sure it would be used, accepted and wanted? Mr. Johnson: This technology has the opportunity to change our lives in so many different ways, and how we experience the world. When I go to a national park, a museum or things like that, I crave not having to reach around and look at that little sign or try to read that little bit of information and then always wanting more. I think that from an educational perspective, it opens up many opportunities to continually deliver true robust content without lines. From the retail perspective, it opens opportunities for promotions, tracking shopper flow and the time that people are within the building. From the security perspective, there is safety and emergency egress opportunities. There are powerful real estate, event and industrial uses. There are so many things that this technology enables that could not have been done before. Based upon that, we felt like it is and will be desirable technology. It is a global emerging market, and is something that will take a little bit of adoption and education within industries, but it is definitely the future.
CEOCFO: What is the competitive landscape? Mr. Johnson: There is a popcorn of companies appearing in the market right now. There are beacon manufacturers making beacons, and there are a number of people who are working on specific use cases and building SDKs for developers. Many are focused on retail, and many of these will not survive. We intentionally decided to build a platform that non-developers could use and for multiple use cases with the idea that we will continue to fill gaps as we identify them for different verticals. Longer term, we feel our approach is an appropriate one and will not pigeonhole us into a specific vertical or a specific marketplace. It will allow for a lot more flexibility.
CEOCFO: Tell us a little more about the analytics and eventual marketing or opportunities. Mr. Johnson: I will give you a couple use cases as well. From an analytics perspective, this is enabling technology that allows insights that could not be gained before. It is able to track a device and the demographics of that particular individual as well as how long they stayed at the spot, and where they went next. If you are within an organization and visitors are experiencing a museum, for example, perhaps you might want to know where people go and what the traffic flow is of that museum. If you are in a supermarket, how do people experience that supermarket? Do you want to push a ketchup coupon for someone who is standing in front of the hot dog section? All of that information is very valuable, not only from a perspective from who they might be visiting from a general demographic perspective, but how do they experience this space that you are bringing them into and optimizing that. There could be queue analysis use cases. There are safety and industrial uses. If you have workers servicing equipment, you may want to deliver their work order, manual and links to order parts while verifying the equipment exists from a compliance perspective and track the worker as they service equipment, how long the person was there and where they went next.
CEOCFO: What did you learn along the way as you were putting the information out there and as people were seeing what you were doing? Mr. Johnson: One of the things that we added in this last release, which is a very important, is emergency egress functionality. Unfortunately, in today’s modern society, we have to worry about terrorist attacks, fires and other things that we may have not had to worry about in the past. If you are within a space and you are experiencing something, and there is an emergency in that location, you can immediately turn on emergency egress functionality. Based upon where you are, your device can give you the quickest way out from where you are located within that space. It can also live-stream communicate with you while the emergency event is going on. There are things like that, which we have added in to the platform, and other things like scheduling, security, picklists and roll-based unlocking of content, whether your role is as a member or part of your job function and things like that. There is quite a bit of evolution that went on in our thinking. There is a lot more under the hood in terms of functionality and capabilities for people’s security, for configuring a user’s experience and what they are experiencing. We can provide floor plan information and way finding in addition to other useful content. There is also a social aspect to what we are doing. If you are standing in front of some beautiful statue in Italy and you want to send that to your friends, you can click on a button and share that over Twitter, text message or email. There is also history tracking. It is saving the places you have been, and then you can go back, return to those places, and perhaps learn more information about that particular place that you have been that you may not have had time to dig into while you were actually there.
Mr. Johnson: Our business model is what we call BUMs, which stands for ‘beacons under management.’ We are beacon agnostic – you can use anybody’s beacon. We are not tied to any particular manufacturer. Our goal is have customers use our beacon management system to track, manage content and the users’ experience. We merely charge a fee for the beacons under management and their selected tier of service. We actually have three tiers of service for beacons under management.
CEOCFO: Are you funded or looking for partnerships or funds as you move forward? Mr. Johnson: I had sold a software company previously and we had the funds to bootstrap ourselves to launch, which is where we are today. Moving forward, the opportunity is open, and absolutely much too large to operate on a self-funded, slow growth model. We will be looking for investment and this is something we plan to pursue now that we have achieved our production launch. We are also always looking for international and domestic resellers for our PlaceBMS products.
Mr. Johnson: Place Global as a product suite is a core technology enabler that opens up different kinds of opportunities that were simply not available in the past. Near field proximity and delivering targeted messaging, content and functionality to a specific location is something that is useful for a variety of different things. Combine this with the global scale, market size and number of uses makes it a gigantic business opportunity. And unlike efforts by competitors, our product allows for non-programmers and non-developers to enter into the beacon economy without a lot of brain damage. We are making it easy for any company to solve tricky business analytic issues while provide high-touch, high technology solutions. This is why they should care. |
“I sat in that room and I thought this was going to change everything in terms of how we experience the world today. It was a new technology, and is a global emerging marketplace, so I felt like we had to have a service offering for this.” - Alan Johnson
Place Global
Alan Johnson 303.886.5773
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Alan
Johnson