Mobile Innovation and iBeacon at Adobe Summit EMEA 2014

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Screen­shot of Adobe Sum­mit EMEA 2014 iOS app

The launch of the Adobe EMEA Sum­mit 2014 iOS App in the iTunes and Google Play stores, gives me the chance to high­light one of the real­ly excit­ing per­son­al­i­sa­tion capa­bil­i­ties that we’re mak­ing use of this year – iBea­con. As atten­dees move about the Sum­mit event site, they will trig­ger rel­e­vant, per­son­alised mes­sages based on the lumi­nar­ies that are pre­sent­ing in the keynote ses­sions or the con­tent of the break­out that they’re about to see, and all of this will be done using Apple’s iBea­con tech­nol­o­gy and Mobile Ser­vices for the Adobe Mar­ket­ing Cloud.

As con­sumers of prod­ucts and con­tent, we expect to be able to research or pur­chase items wher­ev­er we are, or con­sume high qual­i­ty writ­ten and video con­tent when­ev­er we like on out tablets and smart­phones. We’re get­ting used to mobile tech­nol­o­gy and the mobile chan­nel push­ing the pace of the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. We also expect that brands will quick­ly adopt the new and inno­v­a­tive ways of engag­ing that mobile devices increas­ing­ly bring us. That’s why it’s sur­pris­ing to me that we haven’t seen more Euro­pean com­pa­nies roll out iBea­con sup­port more rapid­ly in order to take advan­tage of this new way of enhanc­ing the expe­ri­ence for consumers.

Last month the Dutch theme park Fluwel’s Tulpen­land (Tulip Land) start­ed using iBea­con to pro­vide con­text-spe­cif­ic infor­ma­tion on each park sec­tion as vis­i­tors come with­in a cer­tain prox­im­i­ty of bea­cons, and those of us lucky enough to live in Chelms­ford in the UK have been able to take part in a Tesco tri­al of iBea­cons in it’s local store, but con­sid­er­ing that iBea­cons was announced as part of iOS7 at Apple’s WWDC event in June 2013, and made offi­cial with the release of iOS7 on Sep­tem­ber 18th 2013, I’m sur­prised we haven’t seen more use made of it already. It might be that organ­i­sa­tions are work­ing out the best ways to deploy them, or cau­tious due to per­ceived issues of pri­va­cy, but I thought we’d have heard more noise about them by now, since they are essen­tial­ly an exten­sion of the already avail­able Loca­tion Services.

I’m pleased to say that we’re mak­ing a noise about our use of iBea­cons at Adobe EMEA Sum­mit 2014 and we’ll have a num­ber of bea­cons deployed around the event space, so make sure that you enable Loca­tion Ser­vices and Blue­tooth while you’re in atten­dance. To learn more about how we imple­ment­ed the iBea­con func­tion­al­i­ty in the app, you should attend the ses­sion _“The new mobile expe­ri­ence: per­son­al­i­sa­tion, tar­get­ing, push, hyper-local­i­sa­tion, ana­lyt­ics and a whole lot more” _with our Mobile Solu­tions Prod­uct Man­gaer, Roger Woods and we’ll also have a great ses­sion in the Per­son­al­i­sa­tion & Opti­mi­sa­tion track called “Loca­tion, loca­tion, loca­tion! Effec­tive mobile tar­get­ing in an app-cen­tric world” where our Mobile Ser­vices expert Ray Pun will be lead­ing a pan­el dis­cus­sion on the use of loca­tion tech­nolo­gies in mobile apps, and shar­ing some exam­ples of organ­i­sa­tions in North Amer­i­ca that have already start­ed tak­ing advan­tage of this type of technology.

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Exam­ple mes­sage received based on iBeacons

So don’t be afraid of iBea­cons, or Gim­bal or datz­ing if you’re on Android, see them in action at Adobe Sum­mit EMEA 2014, take part in the dis­cus­sions and learn how you can start to take advan­tage of the new capa­bil­i­ties they pro­vide you for com­mu­ni­cat­ing with your cus­tomers. And if you’re not already reg­is­tered for Adobe Sum­mit EMEA 2014, reg­is­tra­tion is now closed but you can still be part of Sum­mit Live: http://summit.adobe.com/emea/sessions/summit-live/.