The Mr. Beacon Ambient IoT Podcast

Before COVID, ‘social distancing’ and contact tracing’ were not common household topics, but now we consider them daily. They have been serious guiding principles reshaping how we conduct our lives in order to decrease our risk from the virus. The ability to manage social distancing can be key to businesses being able to operate or not. Addressing this need has changed the shape of many technology companies’ offerings. This week we are thrilled to have Bruce Krulwich, of Grizzly Analytics, back on the Mr. Beacon Podcast in light of his most recent report, ’25 Indoor Location Solutions for Social Distancing and Contact Tracing’. Bruce highlights that there is a distinct difference in approach to Indoor Locationing in the COVID era: a shift from measuring the proximity of people to things, to measuring proximity between people. In this episode, we sift through the many different technologies in the indoor location space - like UWB, Bluetooth, Smartphones, and sound waves, to understand their strengths and weaknesses in terms of cost, battery, precision, and ease of use. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Imagine if there was a way to pay for the product, but not the packaging.A way to avoid paying 20%-30% more per unit imposed by purchasing in smaller formats and simultaneously help save the planet.Imagine if, thanks to IoT technology, the packaging can be used as a mechanism to pay for the product. Meet Algramo, a company trying to introduce a new way to buy. Algramo calls on us to ‘buy your last packaging’, a smart reusable container with a refill service that comes right to your door! Brian Bauer, responsible for Circular Economy and Alliances, explains that Algramo means ‘by the gram’ in Spanish, and that they have been serving the community in Chile and have plans to scale to New York City in the next few weeks. Today, they are working with Unilever to provide a laundry detergent service, with plans to extend to dog food with Purina. Join us this week to learn about circular economy and the technology behind Algramo’s revolutionary way to buy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Imagine arriving in San Francisco from Milan, with a business idea and only money to last you a week. Next thing you know you are crashing at a stranger’s house, notably one that went on to found Uber. Marco Palladino, now co-founder and CTO of Kong, did exactly that. Marco, with his co-founder, was able to build a network and even sign their first investment round at that kitchen table.In this episode, we learn about how their first company, Mashape, turned into the world’s most popular open source microservice API gateway, Kong. Kong is in the business of enabling ‘architectural freedom by connecting all microservices and APIs natively within and across clouds, Kubernetes, data-centers, and more’. Kong has 150M+ downloads of their open source product, 1M+ instances of Kong running per month across the work, and over 250 enterprise customers. Marco calls APIs the ‘3rd industrial revolution in this world’, the ‘assembly line of software’. Tune in this week for a crash course on containers, cloud APIs, and microservices. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When we thought of the year 2020, many of us may have thought we would be flying in our cars and getting our coffee served to us by robots. While we are still working on getting the wings working on our cars, Brain Corp is steadily driving us towards seeing more robots in our daily life. This week on Mr. Beacon, we sit down with Dave Ross, VP of Business Development at Brain Corp, to discuss how robots are changing the industry today, and plans to revolutionize many of the places we visit frequently like the grocery store and airports. Founded in 2009 by a world renowned computational neuroscientist, Brain Corp is the world’s leading technology provider for the autonomous floor care market, with over 10,000 BrainOS-powered active cleaning machines and many more shipped, getting ready for action. While Brain Corp is focused on the world’s largest commercial autonomous fleet of cleaning robots, they are also planning for a future that includes many other services other than cleaning up the split juice on aisle 12. Cameras and radios (such as Bluetooth) built into these robots, can enable many other use cases like notifying out of stocks, locating items, and creating location and temperature maps, to name a few. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

By 2023, those subject to a national privacy law will increase from 10% to 65%. Is this frightening or reassuring? What does it mean to us as entrepreneurs and as individuals?This week, we have a fascinating conversation with Trevor Hughes, President and CEO, of the International Association of Privacy Professionals, or IAPP. The IAPP is seeing exponential growth, with 57,000 members amongst its ranks and adding up to 1,000 new members a month. These include the giants like Amazon, Walmart, and Deloitte. IAPP is the ‘world’s largest and most comprehensive global information privacy community’. They put on conferences, and act as a resource for knowledge assets and certification. In this episode, we delve into why privacy compliance is essential and the financial risk of getting it wrong, up to a staggering 2% of global revenue in fines for violations. Peeling back another layer of the onion, privacy has a become a brand issue, with more people associating the word ‘privacy’ with the word ‘trust’. Trevor Hughes describes privacy as being measured on a ‘continuum of expectation’. Tune in to hear the discussion on how privacy can actually accelerate technological progress and innovation, how privacy differs through cultures and generations, as well as the implications of COVID-19 on privacy standards.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We are talking about tracking rats with a beacon backpack, tools in fighter jets, assets inside nuclear power plants and baseball stadiums with WISERSystems this week on the Mr. Beacon Podcast. WISERSystems has an approach to Ultra-Wide Band locating technology that minimizes the cost compared to traditional UWB tags and readers, while still delivering on industry leading location accuracy. To get very high accuracy their Ultra-Wide Band implementation takes time based measurements for location (instead of the angle of arrival): Time of Arrival (ToA) and Time of Transmission (ToT). WISERSystems believes that their approach saves time and money by showing where your assets are even when a clear line of sight isn’t available. We sit down to talk to CEO, Elaine Rideout, and Solutions Engineer, Logan Maxwell, to get an in-depth look at how Ultra-Wide Band solutions have evolved in the last few years, how the technology is different than other location solutions on the market, and what gives WISERSystems a competitive edge. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Have you ever seen an item like a shirt, whether it be in person or on TV, and wished there was a magic way to discover which brand it was or where to buy it? ID TAG could make this a new reality. ID TAG Technology ‘adds value to digital images and video by embedding real time data and subject location within each image frame’. In one context, this could mean holding up your smartphone’s camera where products would then be identified in frame by Bluetooth sensors, and product information would populate. This week on the Mr. Beacon Podcast, we talk with Geir Vevle, CTO, and Michael Holland, Advisor, of ID TAG and how they are accelerating digital to physical convergence using this Bluetooth technology. Tune in to learn how your retail, broadcast, and social experiences could look like in the future. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

SAS’s vision of transforming ‘a world of data into a world of intelligence’ seems more relevant than ever with the incredible and seemingly endless amount of data we are producing with the Internet of Things. For those who aren’t familiar with SAS, they are one of the largest software companies today, providing a suite of analytics solutions, of which 92% if the Fortune 100 companies use to help access, manage, analyze and report on data to aid in decision-making. This week on the Mr. Beacon Podcast, we are working from home with Saurabh Mishra, who heads up Product Management at SAS for their Internet of Things offerings. In this episode, we talk all things SAS: their company culture, what offerings drive their business, the evolution that brought about the Internet of Things division, and the real life use cases they are solving today in transportation, manufacturing, retail, and supply chain. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How are we going to deal with the pandemic at hand, and how do we return to ‘normal’? These are the questions at the forefront of our minds. Bluetooth may have an answer. Companies, like Estimote, from the first signs of trouble, have been taking measures to transform their existing technology to help in the era of COVID-19. Last time on the podcast, we talked with Jakub Kryzch, CEO of Estimote, about their new product, the LTE beacon. This time he is back to tell us about an innovative spin on that same product which now has the goal of providing a safer and healthier workplace environment through contact traceability. This product, worn around the neck or clipped to a belt, can anonymously and privately help individuals keep their social distance with lights and sounds, as well as help track back when individuals have potentially been exposed. While essential businesses, for example food and drug production, are the targets today to help increase the safety of their workplace, these type of technology pivots could be our hope when restarting the economy after this quarantine period. Tune in to see a demonstrations of Estimote’s Bluetooth contact tracing solution which is shipping now to companies in need, and how this relates to the other options for contact tracing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How do you feel about your failures? Do you fail enough? If we are all supposed to fail fast, what’s the best way of doing it? What do you think of Colgate Lasagna, New Coke or Google Glass? These are just 3 of 100+ failed products featured in The Museum of Failure, ‘a collection of failed products and services from around the world’ with the goal of providing visitors with a learning experience and insight into ‘the risky business of innovation’. This week, we sit down to talk to Dr. Samuel West, Organizational Psychologist and Curator of The Museum of Failure, about how failure, but more importantly how failing mindfully, is essential to progress. We talk about an organization’s culture and effect on exploration and experimentation, principle patterns of failure (or lack thereof), and to keep true to the theme of the Mr. Beacon podcast, we also discuss whether the Bluetooth beacon ecosystem should be regarded as a failure.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.