BrightSign has long brought some of the clearest display to the market. Beautiful to look at, it might have been enough for the company to rest on its laurels. Instead, BrightSign brought BrightBeacon to InfoComm 2016, a technology that lets you interact with digital signage like never before.
“We’re integrating Bluetooth into our platform,” says Jeff Hastings, CEO of BrightSign.
For these purposes, Bluetooth works in two ways. The first is in broadcasting a unidirectional beacon. The device broadcasts something, similar to the way a radio works. Your phone can tune into that broadcast, but it can’t talk back to the station, telling it what song to play next. The second way is that the device sends out a signal, and your phone tunes in, but then your phone can communicate back to the station and tell it what song to play next. Then the station can broadcast back to your phone and tell you that 20 people have requested the same song, or what have you.
In the case of BrightBeacon, your phone is communicating with a piece of digital signage. More than that, the two can transfer data thanks to internet connectivity.
“Let’s say you were on your phone, searching for a product,” says Hastings. “Now there are cookies on your phone saying you were on a website looking for a product. You go to Best Buy and walk by the display, let’s say the Bose display. The app on your phone notices that you’re near the Bose display, so you launch the Bose app.
“That app can now communicate with the sign, and with the back end. Let’s say the back end recognizes the cookies and knows that you were looking for the Bose SoundLink. Also, let’s say you own a pair of headphones that are registered – the app can go back to the Bose registration data, pull up that you have an old set of headphones, and they’ve got new headphones. Even though you looked at a Bose SoundLink, you can now bring up on a digital sign (using the phone as the bridge between the internet back end and the display) the new pair of headphones, and the promotional data, such as upgrading gets you 20 dollars off. And, as for the SoundLink you were looking at, it can now start playing the SoundLink. The SoundLink is playing, and then what shows up on your phone are new genres you can choose to listen to instead.”
Sounds pretty impressive, right? This new piece of technology opens up the door for more engagement with digital signage not only in retail environments, but in the office as well.
Imagine you own a food processing company. There have been new federal mandates on cleanliness in the manufacturing facility and you need to make sure that all of your employees learn the guidelines. You can make your BrightBeacon recognize employees that walk by that haven’t taken the test about the guidelines. Then, the sign will pull up the information about the test and prompt the employee to download the test to their phone, or perhaps even take the test right there at the screen. Before you know it, all of your employees have taken the test. Take that same idea and apply it to company initiatives, information about new products, schedules, etc.
More from BrightSign:
BrightBeacon Features
- Integrated beacon and BTLE technology available on BrightSign 4K1142 players with no “hockey puck” or batteries required
- Delivers 2-screen exposure on both large digital signage screen and mobile device display
- Senses nearby BTLE enabled mobile devices and sends highly targeted content based on location-awareness
- Supports 2-way communication between mobile devices and digital signage
- Offers a fully programmable solution with multiple beacon UUIDs supported, and easy repurposing of beacon and app associations using BrightAuthor and the BrightSign Network
- Works with the BrightBeacon sample app and can be integrated with 3rd party apps
If you want to see BrightBeacon for yourself, visit the BrightSign booth, N2247.
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