This week, we talked to Justin Mann, COO and co-founder of BeaconsInSpace [1] , a two-year-old company that offers Beacon owners an additional source of revenue that has nothing to do with advertising.
[2]Beacons have really been in the spotlight over the past year, and their fast growth trend is expected to continue, with ABI Research forecasting 400 million beacons to be in use by 2020.
Traditionally, beacons are bought, eg, by digital out-of-home companies and largely used to trigger ads or information onto the mobile phones of people who have opted in to receive them. When the mobile phone user is in the vicinity of a beacon, he/she may receive coupons, special deals or discounts from advertisers. The beacon owner gets money from the advertiser.
However, BeaconsInSpace allows the beacon owner to list its beacons on the BeaconsInSpace platform so app developers outside of the proximity ad space can subscribe – providing the beacon owner with a recurring revenue stream and an additional data source. These are apps that are interested in working with the beacon to provide background check-ins and nearby user positioning, not for pushing location-based advertisements.
For example, say a company like JCDecaux [3] has beacons in street furniture at a bus shelter. A social app developer might want to know the number of people of interest to him who congregate at that particular bus shelter. Again it involves an opt-in by the user, but to get the information, the app developer pays to access the information.
“We have 500 app developers listed,” says Mann. “We see this particularly useful for social apps, dating site apps, music streaming apps, navigation and travel site apps. In an airport, rather than advertising, a wayfinder app could give the user full directions through the airport to his gate.
“We have a network of apps but they are not interested in demographics such as age, gender, etc.. A dating site might want to get an idea of how many people using its app congregate at, eg., that aforementioned bus stop.”
BeaconsInSpace collects the anonymous user data on the apps that tap into the beacons, and can then can provide this data back to the beacon owner to expose patterns and strategic opportunities, such as what times of the day it has the most visitors, average dwell time, foot traffic patterns, and user behavior.
Mann says that the BeaconsInSpace can by used indoors and out, and, currently by beacon owners in the US, UK, Canada, France and Australia.
Monthly income will vary based on the size of the app that subscribes to the beacons. Money is paid out monthly. However, Mann refuses to say how much has been paid out to date to beacon owners, by which apps to which beacon owners.
The Boston-based company is owned by the three co-founders: Mann, Ben Smith, CEO, and John Foley, chief architect.