2014 June

In February we announced our partnership with Unilever and now we can state which one of our favorite brands that it’s with, Magnum Ice Cream! It’s a digital marketing first: a CPG brand launching a P2P beacon strategy vs. a retailer. Before diving into how the campaign works with the video below, here’s a recap of beacon technology in marketing today.

Even with NewAer’s invention of any “beaconing radio as an action” nearly five years ago, the beacon world is still in its infancy and rough around the edges. Apple’s iBeacon is just one year old and the most well-known beacon proponent, and to our belief, the few retailers and stadiums currently using it do so via “spammy” experiences. Each time you walk by a beacon, it triggers your phone to create a message of the iBeacon’s intent within an application.

The state of the beacon marketplace today.

Think about it like this; when your phone vibrates, you expect it to be a phone call, text message or an application you’ve permitted to disrupt your personal space digitally. Now amplify this with a new type of walk-by spam, where a second pass by an iBeacon brings up the same message. With iBeacon’s current lack of silencing second events (we call this “flapping,” like a door banging in the breeze) they continue to pop up as new inbound messages. We knew from the start of NewAer that we had to eliminate that while putting the power of the technology into the consumer’s hands.

Summer is here – so what better way to illustrate our automagical, non-intrusive technology than via an ice cream social with a twist?

With the forthcoming Unilever mPulse application, debuting in London as part of the 25th anniversary of Magnum ice cream and powered by the NewAer Proximity Platform SDK, will notify you when a friend is nearby, helping to create a spontaneous rendezvous. This alert is similar to a text message from a friend asking to meet, except it happens automatically via our engine. When there is an ice cream cooler nearby you and your friends, that message gets relayed as well. What’s special for consumers, and critical to marketers, is that we’re creating opportunities to connect with friends instead of a barrage of one-way marketing. Equally critical is the ability to turn off your device beaconing if you want to “go stealth” for some alone time. Naturally, mPulse does that too.

Working with Unilever’s agency Karamarama we came up with the ultimate app for connecting and reimagining the ice cream social – one that is powered by NewAer’s SDK of invisible bits, to create impulsive unexpected connections. Only NewAer could accomplish such a sophisticated campaign (yes, even Apple’s iBeacon cannot) as we are the only company in the space who specializes in making mobile devices like tablets and smartphones themselves communicate as beacons.

The announcement of NewAer partnering with the Unilever Foundry:

Last week we were honored to attend Cannes-Lions as guests of Unilever where CMO Keith Weed generated huge online buzz when he took the stage to discuss their innovation in consumer marketing, with their partnership video featuring NewAer. The opportunities for magical consumer moments driven by mobile technology are endless, and it seems that the trade press is beginning to realize that too.

In sum, ice cream bars never tasted so good! We hope to digitally run into friends in London when we launch in late July, and with the mPulse app, you will too!

We’ve been like kids in a candy store lately and wanted to share some of the big wins that we have had and share upcoming events that you can get involved with too!

NewAer & Unilever Kick Off Consumer Campaign:

In April, we kicked off our project with Unilever in London, which will leverage proximity ranging between fixed beacons as well as handsets that have downloaded their app powered by NewAer’s Proximity Platform.  This will be the first time that a consumer product leverages our “better than iBeacon” framework to enable devices to communicate with one another using our SDK in addition to the traditional application triggering with fixed iBeacons.  More on that to come!

2^nd Patent Awarded:

We were given a notice of allowance for our 2^nd patent around determining a virtual location based upon scanned wireless signals.  This is key to our automation engine driving a “state change” or creating some type of action either on your device or in the cloud based upon seeing a known beacon at a specific signal strength.  For a young company like ours to have two patents so quickly is a testament to our early forward vision and our swift-moving intellectual property team.  Congratulations guys!

Builders and Hacker Demos:

We spent a few days at MIT’s Media Lab Member Event media.mit.edu/events/spring14/day1 and left both inspired and motivated.  We met some teams doing some radically forward thinking projects, many of which were excited about our framework for machine-to-machine discovery.

After a chilly visit to the East coast, we headed to our favorite DIY event called Maker Faire www.makerfaire.com, where 150,000 people come to see what thousands of others built from their workbench or garage.  The quality of some of the vehicles blew us away, but we were most excited about the kids there who had built communication circuits, robots, and even a pneumatic actuated bench that was synchronized to a roller coaster ride!  Keep it up future inventors!

Partner Demo Days:
The first week of June we are in Dublin at our telecom partner Alcatel-Lucent IMS User’s conference, where we show our “one number to any destination” routing using proximity and their IMS infrastructure www.alcatel-lucent.com/products/converged-telephony-server with CTS and the Self Care API. A video of the debut of it is here.

For the second week we head to London for the Europa’s theeuropas.com, then Founders Forum www.foundersforum.eu as we ramp up for London Technology Week londontechnologyweek.co.uk. We are sponsoring a hackathon with the Sand Pit Labs hacximity.org where we’re giving an early look at our 4.0 SDK that allows peer-to-peer communication over unpaired BlueTooth Smart links and a prize for the best use of our SDK! Sign up for the hackathon here!

For the last half of June, we head to Berlin for our investor T-Venture www.t-venture.com with their T-Labs and T-Systems division around next generation automotive showrooms and retail traffic measuring and marketing.

We wrap our month of demos and meetings Europe at the 5^th year anniversary of the MLOVE ConFestival mlove.com/confestival/ were we will share stories of the Maker Faire and the future of all things triggered from any beacon!

We’d love to meet you at the events above, so let us know if you’re going to be in the mix above too, and lets talk about our better than iBeacon framework.  We would love to see how it can tie into your applications or infrastructure!