#digital insight

My new ideas about beacon applications

Thought beacon technology is still improving and struggling with the limitation, it is a rising star nowadays. Beacon is a small wireless sensor that can be attached to any place. It will broadcast tiny radio signals. When a customer pass by with Bluetooth opened on their smart phone, he or she will directly receive the message. In other words, beacon technology is to detect where a customer is and push timely messages to that customer providing information or service.

Beacon technology nowadays is mostly used in retail stores for coupons delivering since retailers are the first obvious market. However, I think beacons can be widely used in different ways.  I am thinking that how about not only just pushing coupons or passing along information, but also improving customer experience through Beacon service. Therefore, I designed three ways of using beacon technology especially for tourist industry in New York. It can be widely used in museum, tourist spots, botanic garden or gallery.

First, beacons can provide maps and floor plans to guide visitors to different places. For example, imagine when you go to the observatory of Empire State, you might have no idea what these skyscrapers are. Beacon technology can sense your location and give you timely information about your view. When you go to the gallery or museum, beacon will provide you the floor plan, guide you where to go, and give you route planning.

Very interesting series of Hangout Style videos are being pushed out by Benzinga as part of their ongoing Fintech Awards series.

Shane Leonard CEO at Stockflare

Matt Porzio VP of Strategy & Product Marketing at Intralinks

Atish Davda CEO at EquityZen

Hussain Zaidi Co-Founder & CEO at Advizr 

Uri Gruenbaum CEO & Co-Founder at TipRanks

Dan Schleifer President & Co-Founder at ChartIQ

Yueyu Fu Co-Founder & CPO at Rippleshot

Gokhan Kisacikoglu at QTRADING by Quants Capital

JD Singh, Director at Vetr

Juan Colón Co-Founder & CEO at Darwinex

Evan Rapoport, CEO at HedgeCoVest

Jose Resendiz, VP at Digital Insight

CEO of Benzinga, Kyle Bazzy is doing a fantastic job running this competition and drawing much needed attention to both the fintech startups and the established companies that are competing for these awards.

Finland Classifies Bitcoin as VAT-Exempt Financial Service

Digital Insight

Thu, Nov 20 2014, 14:26 GMT Also Read: Latest Forex Analysis 

Finnish regulators have classified bitcoin as a financial service, thus granting it VAT-exempt status.

The Finnish Central Board of Taxes (CBT) judged bitcoin to be a financial service in ruling 034/2014, which states that bitcoin purchases qualify as “banking services” under the EU Value Added Tax (VAT) Directive.

Th…

Jim Sullivan, a manager at Bread Winners Cafe in Dallas, monitoring restaurant activity from the back office, via a live video feed.

Dylan Hollingsworth for The New York Times

By STEVE LOHR

June 21, 2014

A digital Big Brother is coming to work, for better or worse.

Advanced technological tools are beginning to make it possible to measure and monitor employees as never before, with the promise of fundamentally changing how we work — along with raising concerns about privacy and the specter of unchecked surveillance in the workplace.

Through these new means, companies have found, for example, that workers are more productive if they have more social interaction. So a bank’s call center introduced a shared 15-minute coffee break, and a pharmaceutical company replaced coffee makers used by a few marketing workers with a larger cafe area. The result? Increased sales and less turnover.

Yet the prospect of fine-grained, digital monitoring of workers’ behavior worries privacy advocates. Companies, they say, have few legal obligations other than informing employees. “Whether this kind of monitoring is effective or not, it’s a concern,” said Lee Tien, a senior staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco.

When Jim Sullivan began working as a waiter at a Dallas restaurant a few years ago, he was being watched — not by the prying eyes of a human boss, but by intelligent software.

The digital sentinel, he was told, tracked every waiter, every ticket, and every dish and drink, looking for patterns that might suggest employee theft. But that torrent of detailed information, parsed another way, cast a computer-generated spotlight on the most productive workers.

Mr. Sullivan’s data shone brightly. And when his employer opened a fourth restaurant in the Dallas area in 2012, Mr. Sullivan was named the manager — a winner in the increasingly quantified world of work.

Still, even people involved in the workplace analytics business say rules governing privacy are needed, if the emerging industry is to flourish.

Ben Waber is chief executive of Sociometric Solutions, a start-up that grew out of his doctoral research at M.I.T.’s Human Dynamics Laboratory, which conducts research in the new technologies. Sociometric Solutions advises companies using sensor-rich ID badges worn by employees. These sociometric badges, equipped with two microphones, a location sensor and an accelerometer, monitor the communications behavior of individuals — tone of voice, posture and body language, as well as who spoke to whom for how long.

Sociometric Solutions is already working with 20 companies in the banking, technology, pharmaceutical and health care industries, involving thousands of employees. The workers must opt in to have their data collected. Mr. Waber’s company signs a contract with each one guaranteeing that no individual data is given to the employer (only aggregate statistics) and that no conversations are recorded.

“Privacy policy,” Mr. Waber said, “is going to have to deal with the workplace and not just the consumer issues.”

The payoff for well-designed workplace monitoring, Mr. Waber said, can be significant. The underlying theme of human dynamics research is that people are social learners, so arranging work to increase productive face-to-face communication yields measurable benefits.

For example, the company studied workers in Bank of America call centers and observed that those in tightknit communications groups were more productive and less likely to quit. To increase social communication, the shared 15-minute coffee break was introduced to the daily routine. Afterward, call-handling productivity increased more than 10 percent, and turnover declined nearly 70 percent, Mr. Waber said.

Mr. Waber’s company also provided the data-guided insight to help the pharmaceutical company increase sales with its new cafe area. At a tech company, his company found, workers who sat at larger tables in the cafeteria, thus communicating more, were more productive than workers who sat at smaller tables.

Bryan Koop, a commercial office developer who has worked with Sociometric Solutions, points to the potential for more scientifically designed work environments. There are current fashions in office design, he said, that are assumed to increase productivity, like stationing workers at communal bench-style tables and constructing work cubicles with lower dividers.

“We don’t know if those tactics work,” Mr. Koop said. “What we’re starting to see is the ability to quantitatively measure things instead of just going by intuition.”

Skeptics warn of a digital-age rerun of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “scientific management” from a century ago, whose excesses were satirized in Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times.” Taylor’s instrument of measurement was the stopwatch, used to time and monitor a worker’s every movement. His time-and-motion studies determined the best way to do work.

Initially, Taylorism was hailed as a progressive force that would free workers from the whim of autocratic bosses and benefit all. “This is the way workplace analytics is being presented now,” said Peter Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

But the ideas of Taylorism, he said, were simplified and hardened into a speedup dogma used by bosses, and workers hated it.

Digital tools for workplace surveillance, according to Lamar Pierce, an associate professor at Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis, can be simplistically viewed as either good or bad. “The real challenge for all of us,” he said, “is what is the right level and in what context is it being done.”

Mr. Pierce was a co-author of a research paper published last year that examined the effect of the monitoring software used in restaurants, like the one in Dallas where Mr. Sullivan works, on employee behavior.

The researchers studied the data on all transactions and patterns suggesting theft, before and after the software was installed, at 392 restaurants, in 39 states. The savings from the theft alerts themselves were modest, at $108 a week per restaurant. More startling, revenue increased an average of $2,982 a week at each restaurant, about 7 percent, a sizable gain in the low-margin restaurant industry.

Servers, knowing they were being monitored, pushed customers to have that dessert or a second beer, which resulted in the increased revenue for the restaurant and tips for themselves.

The monitoring software is a product from NCR called Restaurant Guard. The product, introduced in 2009, exploits the rapid progress in so-called big data technology, for collecting, storing and analyzing vast amounts of data. “That’s the big change that makes this possible,” said Jeff Hughes, general manager for digital insight at NCR.

The software is used in several thousand restaurants. But to test the prototype software in 2008, Mr. Hughes visited his brother Jim Hughes, who owns a few Bread Winners Cafes, a midprice restaurant in the Dallas area. The software has steadily improved, he said, so that it now “lets you see everything that goes on in a restaurant.”

Today, Mr. Sullivan is the one using software to monitor workers. For example, he said, the data might show that someone who is efficient at serving several tables is not very good at sales, if that person’s average ticket is less than the restaurant’s.