#bytelight

The Apple Watch (planned for 2015) is designed to have the same capabilities, such as enabling businesses to send an alert to the device if they think a customer might be interested in a purchase, or in getting information about a product. The Apple Watch has also been introduced as a way to improve customer experiences in general, such as making it easier to check into a hotel or navigate baggage claim, and to receive offers and information during a shopping experience. 

Apple's new technologies are central to providing data both to the customer and the retailer, and allows these devices to accurately establish a location-based connection.

Apple's location-based improvements are closely matched with the capabilities being developed by developers of hardware in the indoor location space. At Bytelight, we are working to provide methods to send and receive specific types of location-based information to help consumers and retailers in a similar way, and we look forward to learning more about the capabilities of Apple's new products.

Our products use advances in lighting technology as a way to outfit stores and other locations with the ability to connect wirelessly with consumers and provide them with information they might need, in a similar way to the capabilities demonstrated by the iPhone updates and the Apple Watch, as well as other technologies that might help accomplish these goals.

Using a new program called WatchKit, developers will be able to create apps specifically built for the Apple Watch that can leverage the BLE / iBeacon technology its using. During Apple's demonstration they illustrated how a user could simply wave their watch in front of a door at Starwood Hotels to check into the hotel and unlook their room.

American Airlines has also created an Apple Watch app where you’ll be able to check in and collect bags with a single tap on your watch. Another use where the watch could communicate with BLE hardware within a certain location.

Rather than forcing customers to constantly take their smartphones out of their pockets while they travel and stay at hotels – often with their hands full of luggage – users can easily access these location-based services via their wrists. In retail stores, offers and coupons will be able to be delivered less intrusively to a shopper’s wrist. More information can be sent out at a faster clip with turning shoppers off to the benefits location-based offers. All they will need to do is take a look at the message as they do the time on their watch multiple times a day.

The Apple Watch and future Wearables serve as a promising data channel for retailers and many other venue owners to customize user experiences indoors. The accelerated speed at which the wearables technology is developing will ultimately alter the way we look at location-based marketing. 

Big-box retailers like Wal-Mart with large storefronts and thousands of stores would need a very large number of beacons to create an indoor location network that provides wall-to-wall coverage. For instance, with most BLE beacon makers suggesting a range of 32 feet and Wal-Mart stores being 102,000 square feet in size on average, they would need to deploy around 32 beacons per store. Wal-Mart, which has more than 4,800 stores in the U.S., would need more than 153,000 beacons. With a beacon cost estimated at around $10, they’d probably be looking at an initial investment of more than $1.5M in hardware costs in the U.S. alone.

Then comes the maintenance costs. While some BLE beacon providers are saying their batteries could last as long as two years, the reality is one year may be the max lifetime and some providers are selling beacons that only last three months. Imagine being a big-box store like Wal-Mart who needs to replace 153,000 beacon batteries annually or maybe even quarterly? You’re talking about new installation and maintenance teams, platform and network managers, etc.

This likely points to BLE beacons being replaced in full annually, rather than simply replacing the battery. That $1.5M initial deployment cost just became an annual overhead expense.

And remember, this is just to support proximity-based indoor location – e.g. a connected shopper has entered the shoe department. To support positioning-based indoor location – e.g. a connected shopper is standing in front of Nikes - the retailer would need to deploy at least 10x the number of beacons, or going back to our basic example 320 beacons per store. Reducing a beacon’s range from 32 feet down to 3 feet is required for this kind of brand-level engagement, but quickly puts beacon deployment off the charts - 1,530,000 beacons for a cost of more than $15.3M in hardware.

That’s a big price to pay for additional hardware. It’s no wonder retailers are concerned about the scalability of beacons, especially when compared to other data-emitting hardware platforms like Wi-Fi and LED lighting which are already in-store and therefore more cost-effectively able to support indoor location.

A retail executive at the conference from Toys“R”Us  noted that it will be extremely difficult to go to his managers asking for an entirely new in-store network to join point of sale, Wi-Fi, lighting and other systems already on store floors. Today the store manager is responsible for managing heating, WiFi, the lights, the POS system, scanners and inventory management. Now you’re going to add a battery-powered network of potentially thousands of beacons to his desk? I just don’t see it happening.

These are some of the issues with scaling indoor location with technologies like standalone BLE beacons and reasons why I really believe LED lighting fixtures will become the platform of choice for indoor location. While BLE beacon shipments will be measured in millions through 2020, LED lighting fixture shipments will be measured in billions – around 1.28 billion annually by 2021 - according to Navigant Research.

Another topic addressed on the Place panel was how do we unlock the next generation of apps beyond proximity and what technical issues arrive when scaling indoor location technologies. Many agreed that this is really just the first inning of indoor location, where it’s all about iBeacon and somewhat standard geo-fencing. The next inning of indoor location (probably only 12-24 months away) will be about micro-targeting (brand-level engagements within three feet) and ultimately utilizing indoor location platforms as a gateway for the Internet of Things.

That is when it will become difficult to scale beacon technologies and ensure they can power more enhanced sensors and applications. Indoor location nodes will need to talk to each other and other connected things, and they’ll need contextual understanding and a network to pull it all together.

It’s this additional reason why I’m bullish on lighting as the wall-to-wall platform that can scale and power these indoor location networks of the future, and why there is a need to strongly consider scalability today when evaluating indoor location technology.

The comprehensive approach enables retailers to reach a broad number of shoppers across the largest area—from the parking lot to anywhere in the store there is LED light. As a result, retailers can achieve continuous ROI on their conversion to GE LED lighting while providing a strategic platform for the connected retail store of the future. In addition, it:

Combinines the cost-effectiveness and potential ubiquity of VLC with the readily available connectivity of BLE

Uses existing lighting infrastructure rather than requiring investment in Bluetooth beacons

Determines the precise location of shoppers within 3 feet

Reduces maintenance costs associated with replacing beacons and beacon batteries bi-annually, given ByteLight is powered by a light fixture with a 65,000 hr lifespan

Fast forward a few days and we're live at LIGHTFAIR (#LFI2014) in Las Vegas at the GE booth, unveiling the solution for the first time! 

What's the difference between iBeacon and sending location information through lights?

Great question! First off, It's important to note that iBeacon is software that is embedded into Apple's new iOS. The frequency that it communicates on is Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). This means that the hardware beacons shopper's phones talk to in-store with iBeacon must be BLE-equipped as well. That's important because at the most basic level the difference between this approach and ours today, is they're operating on two different communication mediums.BLE is radio communication, sending short radio frequency bursts or data packets.

Sending data through lights, as we do, is an optical medium, or more specifically Visible Light Communication (VLC):yabb.ly/gLHUTk In terms of how they are different in terms of what you'd notice when using them:

1) VLC, given it’s optical, is opt-in in terms of needing to have your phone outside of your pocket to work. The lights need to communicate with the camera on your smartphone.

2) With VLC the hardware to talk to shopper's mobile phones is already installed. Lights are in almost every building in the world and as retailers and venue owners migrate to more energy efficient LEDs they each become beacons of information. In that sense, we're turning an infrastructure cost (lighting) into a valuable source of data and a means by which they can engage with customers and employees. Lighting becomes a strategic IT asset, offering a variety of non-lighting apps/services. When you talk about your phone today, you conclude by saying "oh by the way it's a phone too." With lighting you'll say "it can do X, Y and Z, and oh by the way it's a light too."

With BLE you need to install new hardware BLE beacons, and potentially replace those on a bi-annual basis.

3) In addition, almost every smartphone in the world today has a camera on it already to work with VLC-based indoor location. BLE currently only works with iPhones and the most recent versions of Android phones. Hope that helps in clarifying some of the differences. My view is that indoor location will be a multi-technology solution, hybrid will be the theme. No one tech is going to dominate - different technologies will prevail, depending on the requirements of the customer.

Is Apple making their own BLE beacons to work with iBeacon? If they really move aggressively into the space, do they pose a major risk to you and other vendors in the space?

Apple has created a certification program for hardware beacon makers to utilize the iBeacon branding on their third-party products. To the second half of your question, I don't view it as a risk. Their entrance into the space has brought awareness to the category and furthered education among retailers on indoor location and in-store mobile marketing. Ultimately, competition will drive innovation in the market.

Probably a dumb question, but if the lights are being modulated to flicker faster or slower, could they make shoppers dizzy, etc.?

No dumb questions. Many lights (fluorescents, LEDs that are dimmed, etc.) are already modulating at a speed that is far above anything detectable by the human eye. We're just building on top of that and don't slow or speed down anything that would be recognized by the human eye.

It seems like the first use cases of iBeacon and indoor location have been pretty basic. How can retailers create more engaging experiences and / or deeper integrations with indoor location / iBeacon?

You're right in many ways. Right now the predominant use cases of iBeacon and indoor location are around sending welcome messages, coupons, deals. During the 2013 holiday season there were some retailers like Macy’s publicly trialling indoor location at a handful of stores, but those were small implementations. Apple did rollout iBeacon nationwide with Bluetooth LE sensors throughout their stores. However, users had to have the Apple Store app downloaded to be able to receive in-store information and users pointed to the location-enabled information being very basic. It was really the first inning of the indoor location market.

James: Now that we know kind of what you're doing and what the problem is that you're solving, what's the state of technology today? I imagine there's a lot of players clamoring to you to be a part of this, how does it look?

Dan R: Confusion would be the word right now. Indoor location has been something that people have been researching for years and years. More recently, it's been a space that is accelerating with market activity. Most notably, last summer with the launch of Apple iBeacon, Apple announced technology built on Bluetooth Low Energy that allows people to send push notifications to smartphones when you're at a building.

That was kind of the first big move into indoor location. More recently, there has been new technologies that have come on to the market like leveraging stuff like geomagnetic sensors, study of the earth's magnetic field, WiFi technologies, MEMS sensors technology, using the accelerometer and the gyroscope in your phone to count your steps as you work around indoors, technologies like ByteLight which use LED lighting infrastructure to determine your location.

It's a lot of noise, lot of confusion in the market. I think what you'll see is a combination of different approaches to this problem that will ultimately result in the best overall solution.

James: So it seems like this problem is a long time problem and there's a hundred different angles to attack it from. ByteLight is solving this issue from one of these angles that would be the LED lighting angle. What's interesting to me, let's dive in to a little bit more. You mentioned that this can be done with infrastructure that's already in place. So it's already the sensors on your phone, it's the fact that these lights are already in super stores, is that my understanding of it?

Dan R: Yeah, the beauty of the ByteLight approach is that it leverages infrastructure which needs to be there anyways. Every building in the world has lights. Lights are ubiquitous. They're dispersed throughout the entire space. They have power to them already. So we won't have to install any additional infrastructure for the ByteLight system to be made of use.

On the mobile phone side, we worked with the existing smartphone cameras. We don't care whether it's an iOS device or an Android device, we're completely agnostic to the type of device that the users are using. Whereas some other technologies like Apple's iBeacon for example only work on phones with Bluetooth Low Energy. That's only going to be iOS devices and the most recent Android devices.

James: It would seem you guys have an inherent advantage just because all these infrastructure is already in place and the marginal cost to get you to a point which is this usable in our everyday lives is much lower than what you would say with trying to install new infrastructure and new types of lights from maybe some of the other solutions.

Dan R: The infrastructure component is one big piece. The other big piece relative to other technologies is accuracy. A solution like Bluetooth, solution like WiFi today is good enough to say you're either in the store or in a certain location in the store like the clothing area or the refrigerator area.

With technology like ByteLight, you have the ability to pinpoint the exact location of the user to some meter accuracy. I can say definitively the user is on isle five standing in front of this said products. Once you enable that, you enable a new dimension of applications to become possible.

James: I think people have at least heard the news articles about hyper location, advertisement pushing, what have you. That's at least have been a buzz for a little while. What are the applications beyond that do you see?

Dan R: The one people are always afraid of, I'm going to walk into a retail store and be spammed with advertisements is a bit annoying to me. I actually don't think ... Consumers just aren't going to accept that sort of user experience. I think the more interesting applications we're seeing right now ...

Recently, Tesco announced that they were doing an iBeacon roll out and the application was actually for customer service. You could pull out your phone in a certain location in the store. Say, I'm standing in front of digital cameras which is something that typically users have questions about. Immediately on my phone, I can get connected with a remote associate who is an expert in digital cameras and it's leveraging location to connect the user's phone with that remote associate.

I think retailers right now are trying to figure out what are the most compelling use cases and ultimately they have to deliver value to consumers in order to gain their acceptance and trust.

James: One of the things ... My day job is I'm a business intelligence and analytics and I cover things like big data and what have you and this seems like an opportunity to generate millions of new data points that I'm sure a lot of people would find very valuable.

Dan R: Yeah absolutely. This is kind of a broader theme of what's happening in the lighting in general right now. The lighting industry is a 100 billion dollar industry. Previously, it was an analog industry, technologies like incandescent, bulbs, fluorescent bulbs.

More recently with solid state lighting and LED technology, lighting is evolving into more of a platform for non-lighting applications and services. Your light is no longer just providing illumination, it's providing things like indoor GPS. It's providing things like new data streams, new data sources and all of that is coupled into the ability to combine this data with other sets of data that's already being generated. It's certainly a big data feed to this.

James: It occurs to me based on what you just said that we might have been taken it for granted. Can we just take maybe three or four sentence back what is it about LED lighting that makes it unique for this? The modulation of how fast it goes.

Dan R: ByteLight has enabled via LED lighting because LEDs are digital which means you can switch them really, really fast. What the ByteLight technology works is we have a chip that's embedded into the lighting fixture and that chip causes the LED stream to modulate, to switch on and off so fast that I can see it but in a way that's detectable using the camera on the smartphone device.

Via that data transmission from the light to the smartphone, we can figure out the location of where the user is indoors. Each LED light is kind of acting like a satellite for GPS.

James: I don't think that we can have this much technological change in terms of our interactions with everywhere we go without it disrupting or causing a lot of things to change. How do you see in the future our lights being changed by this type of stuff?

Dan R: You could tie this to what's happening broadly in computing right now. We went from the original incarnation of the computer as a mainframe and that's a personal computer. More recently it's a mobile computer. The next phase are things like wearables, computers kind of being all around -- as in disappearing.

The coupling of location with that will allow computing to get hard of our way. We don't have to ask questions explicitly because computers will understand what we're doing and give us information that we need before we can even ask for it.

James: Where are you seeing that the biggest advances in say retail, who are the early adapters who's kind of showing a way from this, what's the profile of someone that wants to take advantage of this technology?

Dan R: Broadly within retail, you're seeing every dimension, every tellers look at indoor location technology. A lot of people are experimenting with Bluetooth Low Energy and iBeacon right now. In terms of the areas that we focus on, because our technology needs to be embedded into LED lighting, we're looking for retailers that are actively switching or in the process of switching over to LED light.

We're seeing the most demand for that in specialty retail as well as in big box and grocery retail. Environments which are switching over and actively in the process of transition. Our long-term view is that ByteLight isn't necessarily a story about modulating light for location. That's not what we're really all about. What we're really all about is saying, "Okay, how do we take this infrastructure that's been in buildings for 150 years and doing one thing, providing illumination and re-purpose it for a completely new functionality?"

Light modulation is one example. Indoor location another example. In the future, we can talk about actually doing wireless data transmissions through LED lights. You can talk about LED lighting involving into the infrastructure for sensing, for building intelligence, for understanding where people are indoors. For combining that data with other data sets that you're going to have about what people are doing, where they're going.

Ultimately, I view lighting as completely complimentary to mobile. That can be confusing because mobile is all about an individual user and device-centric. It's about what's happening to me. With lighting and infrastructure, it's about what's happening to everyone in the space. And the intersection of mobile and LED lighting infrastructure is where ByteLight sees itself fitting in.

James: I love that story. I think one thing that will be interesting to say too is how the mobile device will evolve because we know how fast mobile devices have come. I went from a brick phone not too many years ago to having the latest and greatest iPhone. As they start to incorporate technology explicitly for lighting and all the implications and applications you just said, does it become more focused on the user? Can we separate the two devices? Does everyone have kind of a chip or become smaller and more accurate? What's kind of the end result do you think?

Dan R: People often times in the lighting industry today, we draw the analogy between what happened with phones when the iPhone came and what's happening now with lighting of the LED has come. In the past, it was all about your phone is a phone. It's predominant functionality is to call someone and talk to them and more recently, it's obviously about apps, it's about now I use my phone to find a taxi, uber, I use it to order food, I use it to purchase things.

The phone is of all is this platform for a whole slew of different apps that have nothing to do with phone calls. Lighting is going to follow the exact same path. Lighting is going to be defined more and more by the non-lighting things that lighting is going to enable.

In terms of how it impacts the lighting industry, that's the big unanswered question right now because the other thing about the LED is that normally isn't more energy efficient, but it also last 10 to 15 years. Lighting companies right now are in their position which they're saying, "Okay, I'm replacing my previous products which lasted two to three years, incandescent and fluorescent lights with an LED product which last 10 to 15 years."

Where's my margin going to be tomorrow? It's no longer going to be in the sale of a hardware, it's going to be in the sale of the software services and data oriented applications that are now built upon the lighting system. In the same way that the mobile phone business is no longer defined as certainly by just selling devices, it's selling services that are enabled by devices.

James: Yeah, that's such an interesting point. I think what's going to happen to. You have all of the major players in the lighting infrastructure industry moving in this direction.

Dan R: Yeah, the lighting industry definitely gets it. They're trying to figure out, as we all are. It's the challenge of the problem to understand what the future is going to look like, but everybody understands that the value capture is going to be less and less at the hardware level and more and more at the software and intelligence level.

The evolution kind of completely mirrors what happened already in computing because you saw the evolved companies, the Dells and Gateways of the world were selling PCs and more recently the big winners in the computing industry are Google, Facebook, Twitter, services and data-driven companies. Lighting is just beginning that transition, but I think it will follow. I think we have a completely analogous path.

James: So this isn't the story of the old guard of the industry not waking up to the world and being so to change. This is, "Look, we've already seen this out two, three, four, five times in other industries. We're next, let's attack this head on and this just ..."

Dan R: There's always going to be some new entrants. Can they actually move quickly enough to take advantage? That's the opportunity for new companies. Can new companies be really, really focused on a piece of technology or a solution or a service that the bigger companies are necessarily as focused on and build value there?

James: So almost light as a service could come into play?

Dan R: Yeah that's a legitimate possibility. Cisco right now is making a big play into thinking of lighting as more of a service business. Phillips has talked about that as well.

James: I love it and LED seems a win, win, win, win. You mentioned it's more cost-effective, it last longer and it opens up all these new applications. It's really no-brainer for everyone to switch and adapt this.

Dan R: It's only a matter of time. There's also other interesting use cases that we even talked about before when you couple mobile with lighting. Maybe the blue light special comes back. It's actually pretty difficult to navigate in a retail store with my head facing down on my phone. I rather be looking around.

Maybe, as I walk throughout the store, the lights in front of me are guiding me to the product they want to find. Maybe they're changing color. Maybe they're interacting with me at some way. All these possibilities become enabled once you have the connection between the infrastructure who's foundation is going to be built on solid state lighting and the user's mobile or wearable device.

James: So we take that step one step further. We're saying though lights might interact with me, but they might interact with me differently than you based on the profile that can be compiled from the other data collected about me. So maybe the lights point me towards milk but they point you towards orange juice. That's a really simple example, but if you interconnect our profiles and the whole big data thing, it's not hard to see that being part of the future.

Dan R: Yeah, in the same way that the mobile offer that you'll see when you're standing at one location in the store is going to be different than a mobile offer that somebody else is going to see based on different profiles. You can imagine the environment will respond to you in the same way.

Kind of like Minority Report. The screen says, "Hey Dan, check out this." That message will be different than say what a 35-year-old mother of two is going to see.

James: That's really interesting. I would suspect that we probably only have the opportunity to scratch the surface of where the world is going to go in terms of this, but there's a lot to think about here. It's going to impact I think a lot of businesses in ways that we haven't really thought of. The retail industry is going to reinvent itself around this I would suspect.

Dan R: Retail is an interesting place right now because brick and mortar retail is trying to answer the question of why it should exist at all. Why does anybody need to go to a brick and mortar store if I can just go to my computer in Amazon or something with two day delivery for free today, same day deliver tomorrow that's coming. The convenience is unbeatable, the selection is unbeatable. The isle is infinite in extension.

Retails are just saying, "Okay, what's my competitive advantage? I have to pay for these stores, they have leases, they cost money to maintain." The advantage ultimately is going to be the experience of being in a store. And leveraging mobile and connected in store assets like lighting and screens and interactive displays is going to be what allows brick and mortar retail to compete against online retailers.

I think ultimately, the end-game is the combination of the two. It's going to be a combination of online and offline and the retailers who best recognize how to exploit that combination are going to be in the best position to win and survive against Amazon and all the activities that's happening in online retail.

James: Yeah and that's definitely a lot of food for thought. Dan, this has been incredibly interesting.