This blog has been neglected as of late. I haven’t stopped writing, I’ve just been putting my words in other places. One of these places is a monthly technology column for ARCHITECT magazine. My first article was published today. It reads a bit like a blog post from here, only it has been properly edited by ARCHITECT’s awesome editor Wanda Lau. I can’t republish the whole thing so I’m going to channel my inner Huffington post blogger by quoting two paragraphs and inviting you to read more at the source:
The implication for architects is that the design process becomes more data-intensive. Decisions about human behavior that an architect once based on intuition can instead be quantitatively tested, proven, or invalidated. Disney can make changes to their parks and observe exactly how the change affects visitor flow and spending.
Retail outlets have been gathering similar data by triangulating customer locations from the Wi-Fi signals broadcasted from their mobile phones. Like Disney, they are using the data to test new store layouts and observe how it impacts customer spending. In a sense, it is not the customer that is being tracked as much as it is the performance of the architect.
Daniel Davis, March 2014, ARCHITECT: http://www.architectmagazine.com/technology/get-ahead-of-technology-by-finding-yourself_o.aspx
Wojtek Borowicz April 9, 2014 at 12:02 am
Hi Daniel,
This is Wojtek Borowicz, I’m a community evangelist at Estimote.
Cool write-up of iBeacon – and thanks for mentioning Estimote. Indoor positioning of course has a tremendous potential, but keep in mind that iBeacon stanard is not exactly meant to provide ‘indoor GPS’ kind of experience. It was built to provide real world context for mobile apps and devices, and drive user engagement with that 🙂
There already are numerous great examples of that, such as Tulpenland (http://blog.estimote.com/post/81720350961/tulip-theme-park-tells-its-story-with-estimote-beacons) or The Rubens House (http://blog.estimote.com/post/77385955199/estimote-beacons-are-enriching-experiences-at-the).
Cheers.
Daniel April 9, 2014 at 2:41 am
Hey Wojtek, thanks for sharing those examples. It’s interesting to see how far the technology has already come.
While the iBeacon standard uses proximity to beacons, there are other companies who are working on indoor positioning systems that behave like GPS. For the purposes of this article I think it’s fair to lump the two together, but in a strict sense your point is correct.