A Journey of the Culturally Curious - Part 3.

This week The Fetch guided me toward possibly the geekiest of my cultural experiences so far; a panel QnA and hosted by the Churchill Club on the sexiest of subjects ‘The Hyper-Local Opportunity’.

The panel consisted of three experts; Geoffrey Ramadan - Managing Director, Unique Micro Design, Phillip Biggs - Managing Director, Iqua Technologies and Paul Beardsell - CoFounder, Carter Digital.

The technology being discussed was NFC (Near Field Communications) and BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy). Simply put this refers to the capability of smart mobile devices to be able to communicate with their surroundings via tags and sensors. Many would know of these as iBeacons (Apple’s version of these tags).

In short they are pretty cool - beacons can communicate with relevant applications on our phones telling them interesting things about proximity, location, distance and even heat. All of these things allow your application to deliver you back relevant information intuitively.

An interesting technical side note is that this BLE is a technology that works across iOS and Android platforms. The only difference being that Apple Beacon has predefined the 31 bits of information its tags transmit making it consistent for configuration through to their apps; assumedly this is to provide Apple some control over their useage.

So what can these sensors (beacons) do and what are they useful for?

Geoffrey summed it up nicely when he said that sensors provide the eyes and ears for the software. In other words these tags provide context. The who, where and when, in conjunction with software on the phone is then able to figure out the information you need or require based on that context and what the application’s purpose is.

Imagine if you will a doctor walking through a ward with an iPad where every patient’s bed is tagged. That coctor could conceivably then walk through the ward and magically see each patient’s records on the screen without any searching or clicking – slick.

What else?

The next few years are going to see a land grab for applications as tags become ubiquitous. Retailers in particular will be clamoring for the 7 inches of screen in our pockets. This means consumers will need to start to think about their apps like opt-in for email, managing the permissions, how and when they will talk at us.

For me the revelation (advertising bias) is that BLE feels like it’s going to be even more broadly useful and relevant for private and commercial use than for end consumers. I mean how many “special offer” messages do we really need or want on a trip to the mall?

What about instead, a house that asks you if you want to turn lights on or configure your heating when you walk in the door?

In the workplace there is even more scope for application. Think about a warehouse environment for example where every crate or box can reveal its contents and location without having to use scanners or other manual sighting processes.

The future of networks is shifting, moving from centralised systems to peer-to-peer hubs – our devices creating mini-private networks amongst themselves.  And that’s good because we won’t have to reply on wi-fi, and it also means our data is safe from Big Brother.

So this future looks like it could really turn out to be a bit like minority report after all.

Andrew Reeves

Communications and Digital Director

Naked Melbourne