Mister Beacon

Even with the obvious benefits of illuminating your supply chain with IoT technology, assembling all the pieces of the solution puzzle can seem like an onerous task. Who best to shed some light on the topic of scaling IoT than Bob Proctor, CEO of Link Labs. Bob used to be a McKinsey consultant and his company works with the largest wireless carriers, hospitality providers and eCommerce providers. Link Labs is an end to end solution provider for asset tracking and monitoring – a true expert at bringing the puzzle to life, both with ease and affordability. In this episode, we dive into what makes up a solution, starting at the product level to discuss performance, data efficiency, and networks. All the way to through the layers that lay above: operations, financials, training, and support, to name a few. Tune in to hear an interesting discussion about the best drivers that scale projects and to hear Bob’s thoughts on the state of the Internet of Things Industry. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-ou

IoT insiders know that Bluetooth is not just the wireless technology that we know and use on a daily basis, but also the nick-name of the late Danish king and great communicator, Harald Bluetooth. Forkbeard, Bluetooth’s son, known for his navigational expertise is a perfect name for the company we are talking with today. Forkbeard combines the best of Bluetooth and ultra-sound technology enabling the centimeter-level accuracy needed for useful services and movement insights in indoor environments. Join us as we sit down with Wilfred Booij, CTO of Forkbeard, to learn how they are achieving thier mission of taking the GPS revolution indoors. We will talk accuracy, latency, size, and functionality of ultra sound, as well as a side by side comparison to other positioning technologies. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

What could possibly go wrong when huge businesses try to engage with startups? What should startups expect when they try to sell to much larger companies?  How would a partnership between companies like Bissell, Steelcase, and Whirlpool help avoid the issues that occur when entrepreneurs penetrate large enterprises?  Join us this week with Dana Lowell, Co-founder of Seamless, to find out the answers. Dana’s extensive experience also leads us to an exciting conversation about the future of automotive and IoT. We find out how the industry is transforming and how connectivity and the cloud are changing the automotive supply chain and vehicle functionality. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Where are the dark spots in your supply chain?How could your business transform with digital twin of your supply chain? We are talking about continuous, real time location, condition, and contextual data, when you need it. In 2014, a team of Silicon Valley veterans built a cloud system that bridges the physical and digital worlds. Cloudleaf’s vision is to ‘take a radical new approach to unlock the massive value within supply chains, and transform them into more powerful, data-driven strategic assets’ using IoT, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and advanced analytics. This week we sit down with Mahesh Veerina, CEO of Cloudleaf to learn how continuous visibility leads to continuous intelligence. All this allows you to move faster and make more informed decisions. Tune in to get the inside scope on the business justification for investing in real time visibility and sensing – what the ROI is on tagging everything, adding in the reading systems, and all the changes in processes. See acast.com/

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 stre

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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out informatio

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, an

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

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’. Tr

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 competi

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.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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 techno

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.   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 Architect of Van Tyne Group, coaches us on some of the tools they use to help companies ensure the customer journey is a success such as heuristics, personas, and usability testing. Find out more about how user experience and customer experience gained importance and the companies that drove it.   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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. This week we talk to Brad Ree, the CTO of The ioXt Alliance. This international standard for IoT security was brought to life by some of the tech giants you might be familiar with: Google, Amazon, Comcast, T-Mobile, to name a few. In this episode, we dive into how the ioXt Alliance defines IoT and the vast differences that consequentially create notable variances in security requirements for each. Acknowledging that IoT is scaling and with scale comes increased risk, we continue the discussion about the tradeoffs such as cost, usability, longevity, and more. Turn in this week to learn how The ioXt Alliance is evolvin

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 current state of the Internet of Things ecosystem in all its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. We talk IoT A to Z from sensors, performance, platforms, privacy, security, as well as use cases. Tune in this week to learn what IoT is good for – the use cases where the strengths are manifested and those where it’s not such a good fit.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 tracking vehicles in large outdoors lots by providing an essential piece of the equation, long range. In addition to range, we touch on the benefits and tradeoffs of the software and hardware architecture and business model decisions leading to SAS. We leave a little something extra at the end for those aspiring to be a CTO. Jim gives us the inside scoop from his extensive experience at Cognosos and companies like Cisco, Motorola, and AT&T.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 business context. Ingy believes ‘it is time for a new approach to smart buildings’ so they have built software for a mesh sensor network that is licensed to lighting manufacturers, sensor manufactures, and portal providers. This software offers lighting control systems and a wide range of smart building services like sub metering, asset tracking, indoor navigation, occupancy analytics and more.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 environment”. HT Snowday, VP of Innovation and Technology Development at Midmark, joins us today to talk about how Midmark is also in the business of Real Time Location Systems (RTLS). This week we get a different perspective, a customer-orientated view, of RTLS technology in one of the largest organizations in healthcare. Join in to hear about the different technologies they use in a variety of healthcare use cases, such as asset tracking, device management, patient/caregiver management, and work flow processes.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.