Motorola has created a retail wireless connectivity platform called MPact. It combines WiFi and Bluetooth and doesn’t require customers to do anything to receive content on a smartphone as they browse through a store. The Bluetooth indoor positioning technology is called iBeacon and very location specific within a little over a meter (four feet). When a customer stands in front of a product display an iBeacon pushes information out to their smartphones alerting them to product details. An iBeacon located at a store entrance can let customers know about instore sales from the moment they walk through the door.
Costing about $30 each and less expensive than installing a store-wide WiFi network, iBeacons work very well in conditions where radio frequency interference could impact a wireless LAN. To round out the Motorola MPact offering the company is including a suite of software tools that include Swirl, a mobile marketing platform for distributing content, Aisle411 and Phunware for instore navigation and mapping, and Digby Localpoint for location-marketing and analytics.
I’ll be writing more about ubiquitous wireless connectivity in future postings and would like to hear from you my readers about user experiences both noteworthy and un.
Postscript
Today’s posting is a quick one. In approximately seven hours from now I’ll be walking my about to be married daughter down the aisle. And its Mother’s Day which makes the day twice as special.
