With beacons now beginning to play a prominent role in the digital signage world, it was great to meet both the team from Gimbal [1], already a strong player in the beacon market, and people from AdMobilize [2], the new up-and-comer in the market, when I attended the OAAA/TAB Conference and Expo in San Diego last week.
[3]Rodolfo Saccoman
I then had the opportunity to meet Rodolfo Saccoman, founder and CEO of the new AdMobilize. The three-year-old company is majority owned by Saccoman along with some unnamed angels plus Azoic Ventures [5] and Rokk3r Labs [6], both Florida-based – and the company expects to be raising a Series A in a couple of months, because it has big plans and a lot of technological development underway.
“The company was born to solve how to quantify real world physical space data and how it converges to the online smart grid,” Saccoman told us. “We want to be the Google of the physical world.”
That all sounds very highfalutin, but Saccoman has some solid ideas. His AdBeacons at the moment are bigger than the various beacons of Gimbal (used according to what is needed by the client). AdMobilize AdBeacons are about the size of an iPhone although lighter and thicker – partly because they are contain a camera for compiling data on the viewers, a GPS, an on board processor, Blue Tooth, a Wi-Fi connection and advanced object algorithms. They can plug into any digital billboard or traditional poster. Connected to an app and Wi-Fi, they convert into a smart hub.
“We use advanced algorithms regarding facial recognition and object recognition, and our technical people are working on our beacons soon being able to recognize brands,” said Saccoman. “The AdBeacon camera takes multiple pictures per second and then we can run algorithms in real time. Of course, everything is private and anonymous.”
Saccoman’s earlier career was in marketing for The Breakers Resort where he build its digital footprint and then was a partner in building MyTherapyJournal.com, a platform for online therapy. (This latter won him investors during the first year of Shark Tank.)
“AdMobilize will be offering three more products within the next three months that all have tentacles into the DOOH world,” said Saccoman. “They are current being trialed in stealth mode. We have four patents pending and will be writing six more in the next four months. We have a staff of 30, spread between Miami, London and Bogota, almost all highly leveraged computer scientists and engineers. We are agile, fast and very focused.”
He says that his AdBeacon advantages are that they are easy to install; have a real-time dashboard; and can push ads based on the audience and measurement.
And while we weren’t allowed all the details, we know that his product is currently being used for measuring audience engagement by Coca-Cola in association with Havas.
AdMobiize has compiled a strong board of advisors, among whom are Mok Oh, former chief scientist at PayPal; Kurt Holstein, founder of Rosetta Digital; and Dr. Noel Elman, head of the Elman Research Group at MIT.