Mister Beacon

Do you know the global language of business? The language of Unique Product Codes (UPCs) that identify products and companies for sale in stores and major online marketplaces? This language enables barcodes, playing to the beat of 6 million scans a day, all over the world. This week we sit down with Melanie Nuce, SVP Corporate Development at GS1 US, to learn why more than 300,000 companies across 25 industries turn to GS1 for guidance. GS1 is a not-for-profit global standards organization, most known for supply chain identification. 50 years after the barcode was first scanned, GS1 continues to help brands and retailers leverage unique identities, capture information in a machine-readable way, and share data with trading partners to drive business decisions. Tune in to get a behind-the-scenes look into business, and to learn all the things you need to know about GS1 and it’s standards.   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

For the first time on the Mr. Beacon Podcast, we have put the rubber to the road and experimented with a solution internally before sitting down for the interview. This week, we are happy to welcome Nathan Dunn, CEO of BlueCats, back on the podcast to discuss the experience of deploying their contact tracing solution in our local Wiliot office. The BlueCats solution is both preventative and reactive in nature, by warning users to keep a safe distance while providing a tracing system to warn users of possible past exposure. Nathan calls the solution a ‘physical insurance policy’, enabling employees to feel more comfortable coming back into the work environment. Hear how our tests worked out and what Nathan’s latest observations are on the evolution and intersection of UWB & BLE.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

What does it mean to ‘modernize your supply chain’?To Digimarc, it involves moving beyond the conventional barcode to an imperceptible data carrier, the Digimarc barcode, that can be repeated many times on packaging without spoiling the appearance. Digimarc is helping businesses across many industries solve for brand protection, sustainability, and traceability. Their digital identity can be applied to material and media of all kinds, including packaging, labels, audio, fabric, and more. We welcome Sprague Ackley, Principal R&D Engineer at Digimarc, back on the Mr. Beacon Podcast to learn about the technology behind the invisible barcode and how it works. Tune in to learn about the use cases that are driving leading retailers, brand owners, packaging suppliers, and even all of the currencies of the world to adopt the Digimarc Barcode. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

How is it ‘that virtually every person on the face of the earth has the ability to scan a barcode in their pocket’? Success in IoT depends on understanding how the ecosystem operates. Auto-ID is a building block at the heart of IoT and AIM is the industry group that defines auto-ID standards. It does the things that companies on their own, even giants, can’t achieve. This week we have a peek inside AIM. For ‘nearly half a century, it has provided unbiased information, educational resources and standards to providers and users of these technologies’, Barcodes, QR Codes, RFID, and Bluetooth, to name a few. Sprague Ackley, Principal R&D Engineer at Digimarc, a contributor to AIM for much of his career, points out the many parts of our lives that auto-ID enhances: think of getting packages to your door just in the nick of time, making sure your COVID vaccine has been accurately tracked and traced, or the military receiving the materials they need under incredibly difficult conditions. Now that

The next time you buy a product, a purse or a pair of shoes, imagine the capabilities that could be unlocked if it were really a platform.The purse could digitally verify its own authenticity, your shoes could seamlessly share the story of their design and origins. ‘Product to Platform’ is the transformation Blue Bite have been enabling: A new way of engaging customers throughout the entire product lifecycle to protect the brand, tell its story, and enable new product commerce opportunities. Blue Bite plays in many industries and has worked with many notable brands like L’Oréal, Bulgari, Adidas, Moët Hennessy, and Samsung. They have helped these brands digitize their products with connecting technologies like QR codes and NFC, which are managed by their ‘Experience Studio’ platform. Tune in this week as we chat with Mikhail Damiani, CEO of Blue Bite, to hear about which applications are driving each of these technologies and the new experiences that Blue Bite are bringing to market.  See a

Why is it that decision makers should care about data science? The simplest answer could be that some of the biggest businesses are leaders in data science. Think of Netflix, Amazon, Google, Facebook. Their content is all curated by artificial intelligence. Tune in this week to hear a fascinating episode with Dr. Stylianos Kampakis about data science in our world today and to dive into his book “The Decision Makers Handbook to Data Science”. We double click on all the buzz words: artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning - demystifying and providing context to these subjects that are important for leaders to understand.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

 You’ve heard about the Amazon Go Store and all the big box retailers implementing technology to transform the way we shop, but are we seeing the same advancements in the luxury sector? This week we talk to Inspify, a technology company that is ‘reinventing the art of retail in luxury boutiques’. Thorsten Walther, CEO of Inspify, sits down with us to talk about their product: a customer experience platform as a service. Currently, their focus is creating custom experiences for luxury brands in the boutique and online for jewelry and watches. Tune in this week to catch a glimpse of Inspify’s exceptional work turning the offline to online with the creation of virtual boutiques, equipped with the ultimate live chat feature with a sales representative. Coming full circle, we learn about how Inspify are using beacons on time pieces to engage with customers as a tool to enable social sharing and immerse them into product storytelling. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Why would you want Near Field Communication, or more commonly known as NFC, technology in soccer balls, hand bags, and COVID testing kits?After this conversation with Avery Dennison’s Head of NFC business, Amir Khoshniyati, you’ll be asking ‘Why not?’. To name a few uses that Amir mentions, the unique ID that NFC provides can enable authenticity, consumer engagement and loyalty, and supply chain visibility. Avery Dennison, who recently acquired Smartrac, are a company whose products are used in almost every industry. These include ‘pressure-sensitive materials for labels and graphic applications; tapes and other bonding solutions for industrial, medical, and retail applications; tags, labels and embellishments for apparel; and radio frequency identification (RFID) solutions serving retail apparel and other markets.’ NFC technology falls under the RFID umbrella, of which they are the world’s largest provider. Tune in this week to learn about the use cases NFC are enabling today, uniquely in COVID times, a

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.