Future of Marketing – App, Geo-Location and Real time Analytics
It won’t be wrong to say that Mobile phones have become one of the most important elements of our life. Your phone has become virtually your bank account, your gaming console, your computer and even your virtual avatar (chatting, dating and other apps). There was an old saying “ the way to a man‘s heart is through his stomach”, I think the time is just right to say to reach to any human the way is through mobile phones and hence everyone is exploring the way to mobile phones.
Marketing is one of the keys to success for any product or any new entity. What’s the use of making the best product in the world when nobody knows if it, what’s the point of building the largest shopping mall when nobody goes to shop there? One small example is the amount of time and money organizations spend on physical media, advertisements and social media marketing. Even the smallest of startups have dedicated teams for marketing. Technology is evolving so fast that the offline or predetermined marketing doesn’t solve the complete equation. Real time advertisements, real time offers, real time customer interactions and real time feedback is the need of the hour.
During my recent research, I came across one such and must say pretty interesting real time applications which perfectly fills the requirements. Bluedot, (unlike the offline, non-geolocation push notification based apps) works on real time, more precise Geolocations (Geo-fencing) and smart algorithms to understand customers.
Here is my recent discussion with Jordan Long, Head of Strategic Partnerships and Development at Bluedot Innovation. We did discuss about the product along with Security needs for applications, Machine Learning and Artificial intelligence.
Q 1. TechPlayon: How important it is for any business to interact correctly with the end customers and how important is role of applications for the same?
A 1. Jordan Long: There is nothing more important to a business than its customer engagement, perceived and otherwise. The manner you interact with and are perceived by your customer is arguably more important than the technology itself. Consider an application like Uber, there is nothing particularly striking or innovating about Uber’s underlying technology, what they had was a sticky, user friendly interface that, despite the myriad of support issues previously faced and PR issues currently being faced, the company is largely thriving.
It’s all about a tradeoff between experience and value. If you’re delivering a mission critical service, sure, your customer base will tolerate a certain level of erroneous engagement, however, if you’re a social application or generally anything that doesn’t have a massively sticky following you simply cannot afford to mismanage how you engage with your customers. In the location services space we have to tackle this issue head on. The notion of reaching your customer anywhere down to 1cm is so appealing to so many industries but we have to actively drive that narrative so that contextual engagement doesn’t have the opposite effect.
It all comes down to value. Each interaction you have with your customer should deliver them some level of value. If you can’t answer what you’re doing for the customer in any given interaction, you need to ask yourself if you should be engaging at all. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should- and we try to advise all of our clients in that way when managing their location based engagement strategy.
Speaking outside of the realm of the application, the same insight largely applies. Who is more important than your customer? No one. The customer isn’t always right but they are always the priority. That’s often easier said that actually executed. One of the most effective ways to insure a customer first culture is adopted is to implement customer first as a policy both internally and externally. Treating internal customers – other departments, your boss, a consultant- has a miraculous effect on internal processes and workplace environment.
Q 2. TechPlayon: After connecting, the most important information is what users need and at what location, hence geolocation becomes very critical. How is Bluedot application helps with the same?
A 2. Jordan Long: Bluedot Innovation’s Point SDK allows you to interact with the right customer at the right place at the right time. It’s not just about engaging on the basis of location, its about using location to engage contextually. Bluedot’s location SDK allows you to do just that, and with our best in class accuracy you aren’t simply casting a wide net. You’re able to engage with your customer not when they’re on the block of your coffee shop the way you would with alternate solutions, but you’re able to engage with them in real time the moment they walk through the door.
More importantly, our advanced conditioning engine allows you to understand whether or not location is actually relevant to your users. So going back to the coffee shop example, with Bluedot you can know that a user is at the door of the coffee shop but with your conditioning engine, you can also know they just made a coffee purchase an hour earlier and you can tailor your engagement strategy to be slightly changed. Perhaps instead of a discount on a cup of coffee you would prompt the user with a “forget something question” or simply collect the data and not engage at all.
There are many ways that Bluedot allows you to combine the power of location AND context, making ours an incredibly powerful solution for delivering value. At the higher level, we’re also accureat down to 1cm for a Geoline and 5m for a geofence making us the most precise solution on the market. We deliver that GPS level accuracy with negligible battery drain, another key component of our value proposition.
Q 3. TechPlayon: Going forward AI, VR and Machine learning will be integrated part of Applications. Is Bluedot putting some efforts on the same?
A 3. Jordan Long: Absolutely, any company looking to be competitive in the current landscape needs to be prioritizing projects that not only take advantage of advances to AI, VR, and Machine learning but that actively add to the associated innovation and new total addressable market.
With Bluedot we add value to the AI/VR space primarily through a headless version of our SDK. One project we worked involved integrating our SDK in an AR headset and enabling different content to populate based on the location of the user. In this case it was a manufacturing use case in which instructions on how to service a particular piece of equipment popped up for the user.
Machine learning is definitely a major focus for our product roadmap. Our Bluedot SDK becomes smart with each data point we collect.
Q 4. TechPlayon: For every line of business monetization is very important, Bluedot can help every business real time, apart from that do we perform data analytics for smart analysis/reports?
A 4. Jordan Long: Bluedot drives monetization through real time engagement – be it loyalty, payments, advertising, data collection, logistics, ect- but also through the data.
Right now, Bluedot’s user dashboard supports a analytics dashboard that exposes dwell time, check ins, speed, bearing and mode of transportation. We additionally support a live data stream between servers with a latency of 58 milliseconds.
Q 5. TechPlayon: How did you come up with the Idea of Bluedot and whats next for you?
A 5. Jordan Long: Bluedot was founded by Filip Eldic and Emil Davityan several years before I joined the organization. Filip, our chief product officer, set out to create a technology that solved the trade off between battery life and accuracy, which we have more than accomplished. I joined as the first female founding member of the commercial team and I currently run strategic development and technical partnerships, meaning I am responsible for our go-to-market strategy and determining our market position as well as handling our largest and most sensitive clients.
Q 6. TechPlayon: Today mobile phone is everything users banking apps, private data , official emails etc, how important is security with applications which interact with outside systems and how Bluedot takes care of the same.
A 6. Jordan Long: Right next to customer service, dedication to consumer privacy is an absolute must for all applications but particularly those involving location data. For Bluedot privacy is absolutely paramount and for that reason its hard coded into our tech stack with quite literally no way for us to encroach upon the relationship between a company and their users. We facilitate the relationship, we do not view it as our own and for that reason we do our absolute best to make sure that we do not infringe on the consumer’s privacy in any way. We use military grade encryption, advanced anonymization techniques, and do not collect or store any personally identifying information on our servers or other data bases.
Q 7. TechPlayon: How important is India/APAC as market for you?
A 7. Jordan Long: APAC and India are incredibly important markets for Bluedot. As a company founded in Australia, southeast Asia has actually been one of first markets to gain serious traction. In general, APAC/ India are mobile first markets which make them exceptional targets for our product.
About Jordan Long
Jordan Long is currently working as Head of Strategic Partnerships and Development at Bluedot Innovation since June 2016. She has graduated in Bachelor of Applied Science (BASc) from Vanderbilt University in year 2013. You may reach out her @LinkedIn
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordanlong1/
and visit bluedot @
- https://bluedotinnovation.com/