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...

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...

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 e...

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 r...

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...

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...

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 wh...

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 a...

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 E...

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 ex...

This week we shift our focus from the usual suspects, Bluetooth & beacons, to the application experiences they enable. While Bluetooth, proximity and Real Time Location System technologies can increase efficiency and create new user interactions, among other use cases, it is ‘all useless if it doesn’t result in applications that people can engage with’. Sean Van Tyne, Customer Experience...

How do you make the IoT secure? What happens when you don’t? What are some of the most powerful IoT companies doing to address those questions? Full episode here: The ioXt Alliance believes in building a safer IoT world. They believe this world can be made possible through an alliance built on establishing security standards, shaping public policy, and compliance through testing and certification....

Following Mister Beacon's appearance on Coffee with Mr. IoT ( Watch Here ), we switch roles to host Robert Schmid, Chief Futurist at Deloitte, aka Mr. IoT, on this week’s episode! Robert describes himself has as pragmatically audacious with a ‘deep passion and experience in all things digital – IoT wearables, social, mobile, and cloud computing’. This made him the perfect guest to discuss the curr...

This week on Mr. Beacon we talk with Cognosos, an asset tracking SAS platform using both Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) as well as Bluetooth. Jim Stratigos, Cognosos’s CTO, shares with us why LPWAN is the best choice for his automotive use case and what “drove” him to create a proprietary tech rather than using LoRa. Their solution enables dealers and auctions to have a cost-effective way of...

Lighting is everywhere and, conveniently, it’s always powered. This gives it the potential to be a network of sensors for a fraction of the hardware, installation, and maintenance cost of the alternatives. This week on the Mr. Beacon Podcast we meet with Bastiaan de Groot, CEO of the smart lighting company, Ingy, to delve into the disruptive power of lighting, both in an environmental and bus...

Midmark is the 100+ year old company that “we all know, but don’t know”. The last time you were at the doctors or dentist, you were probably sitting on one of their chairs or tables, and most likely surrounded by many of the products they produce like cabinetry, lighting, and diagnostic equipment. HT describes Midmark as the market leader in providing “everything you need to outfit a medical envir...

The Physical Web: What is it, what happened to it, and what is the Physical Web Association’s response? This week on Mr. Beacon we have two of the Co-Founders of the  Physical Web Association , Agustin Musi and James Grant, joining us to give us the scoop on the Physical Web’s past struggles as well as it’s promising future. Listen in to learn how the Physical Web provides a better alternativ...

Ultra-Wideband (UWB) in the iPhone 11 – What is it and what are the implications?   A few months ago a large group of engineers from Apple and Samsung entered the room where a small group of engineers were working on updating a previously obscure radio standard IEEE 802.15.4, mainly used for industrial applications such as luxury car production. Fast forward to a stage in Sunnyvale...

There’s been a lot of talk about the new Bluetooth Angle of Arrival (AoA) standard. This week we have a first-hand account of what it took to deploy AoA technology and how well it worked in a large scale manufacturing environment. At the Quuppa Partner Conference in Finland, we had a chance to sit down with Bob Grimm, an IT Enterprise Architect at NGK Automatics Ceramics USA, Inc. Bob had jus...

‘Digital to physical convergence and the Internet of Apparel, with a sustainability twist!’ Dr. Kevin Dooley, a professor specializing in supply chain at Arizona State University, joins in his role as the Chief Scientist of The Sustainability Consortium (TSC). TSC is a 100+ member community of retail giants including Amazon, Walmart, Walgreens, as well as major CPG Brands, non-profits, and academi...

A few weeks ago we heard about the new Bluetooth 5.1 specification, and notably two new exciting features: Angle of Arrival (AoA) and Angle of Departure (AoD). This week we are reunited with a familiar face, Fabio Belloni, to bring these features to life using Quuppa technology. Fabio Belloni is the Chief Customer Officer at Quuppa, a location platform that has pioneered AoA for RTLS solutions. In...

This one is for sports fans! Liiga, or Finnish Elite League in English, is the top professional league in Finland, and the first be deploying Bluetooth technology in an ice rink! Antti Jussi, CDO of Liiga, joins us to talk about the real-time positioning project in their arenas. Antti paints a picture of Quuppa gateways with angle of arrival technology hanging from the ceilings which track Bluetoo...

Think back to the days when we thought of Bluetooth as the connection between our wireless headphones, keyboards, and the audio systems in our cars. Today we know it as so much more. Bluetooth Low Energy brought to life a new array of connected device applications. Now we are just starting to see the huge potential Bluetooth has in location services. This week we hear from Ken Kolderup, VP of Mark...

We have all experienced the annoyance of a waiter that has disappeared, whether it’s because you need menus, you’ve been waiting to place your order, and especially when you are in a rush to pay your bill. Rene Batsford, CEO andFounder of OrderPay, realized that ordering and paying haven’t really changed for 20 years and there was an opportunity to enhance operational effectiveness that ultim...

Something we talk about often on the Mr. Beacon Podcast is physical to digital convergence. The world of fashion is no stranger to this phenomenon. Apparel now has its own identity and retailers are creating experiences with IoT devices and augmented reality. The blending of fashion and technology is something our guest, Barry McGeough, has seen and been involved in first hand. Barry worked with D...