As mobile becomes more and more powerful each day, companies are trying to reach their consumers and therefore drive more conversion through mobile. Location based ads can play a very significant role in delivering this. In this interview with Techstory, Swarup Sagi, Director, BeaconStream, talks to Techstory about the latest trends in mobile commerce, about BeaconStream and how the company plans to grow in the future.
1. What are the latest trends as you see in Mobile Commerce ? How do you expect the Mobile Commerce industry to grow in the next few years ?
Anything that connects to a customer’s mobiles and wearables is the clear trends seen in this market. Over the last decade, companies – retailers in particular have chipped away at creating a big move or presence on the mobile web. Whether a mobile app or mobile-friendly websites, many of these outposts have focused more on innovation like think virtual dressing rooms, chats etc than practicality.
There wasn’t a clear picture by all these moves, reason being there weren’t enough mobile users to truly make a difference. Then comes a change in 2014, however, as millions of consumers shifted buying behavior to smartphones and tablets versus shopping in-store. In fact, retailers are using more and more technology to engage customer in-store
mCommerce market in India is expected to grow at a pace of 71.06 % over the period from 2012-2016. mCommerce will transform the way the entire country does business. mCommerce in India is primed to explode thanks to the increasing integration of the internet and mobile technology into everyday life. In a country where two-thirds of the population is younger than the national average of 26 with buying freedom and the most explosive growth of new internet users being non-urban, India has a young tech savvy generation of users whose first—and exclusive—means of accessing the internet is over mobile phone. Through creating new opportunities for consumers mCommerce enterprises are disrupting traditional markets and enabling new livelihood opportunities for millions in India’s service sector mainly online and offline retail.
Having a big potential foreseen in mCommerce, flagship players like Flipkart and Myntra are moving their marketplace to mobile.Retail giants are investing heavily in consumer engagement apps to win a user base.
2. Tell us more about your product at BeaconStream .
BeaconStream helps businesses enrich their customer experience by delivering relevant mobile ads based on context, proximity, location and business type. It uses the latest iBeacon technology, which is more location accurate unlike other existing GPS based systems. It helps businesses to increase revenues, branding and customer loyalty. All required tools and technology are provided to make mobile marketing quick, easy and powerful.
[box type=”shadow” align=”aligncenter” class=”” width=”600″]BeaconStream helps businesses enrich their customers experience by delivering relevant mobile Ads based on context, proximity, location and business type. Unlike many existing GPS based systems, BeaconStream uses latest iBeacon technology, which is more location accurate. It helps businesses to increase revenues, branding and customer loyalty.[/box]
Our thoughts behind launching it is to empower businesses to send notifications, data, coupons, promotions and videos to consumers thereby increasing customer engagement and to help businesses understand customer behavior. It also helps businesses to increase revenues in a very cost effective manner. Businesses can have access to marketing insights and enhance shopping experience for consumers.
iBeacon is clearly a path breaking tool for retailers name it any sectors like hospitality, education, healthcare, banking etc. There are approximately 30,000 active beacons, 60 million iBeacon units will be shipped by 2019. Half of the top 100 retailers in the U.S. are testing beacons this year to add to this in-store app usage is 16.5x greater for users who have received a beacon message. These are enough to guess the market size for beacons in 2015.
3. Tell us about the team at BeaconStream.
Mr. Venkat Nallapati is solely responsible for coming up with BeaconStream idea. The total team size of the company today is 15 members. Being an innovative technology expert, Mr. Nallapati has articulated a vision and growth strategy to change the world of mobile marketing and consumer engagement by using beacon technology. He wanted to use indoor location services to revolutionize dozens of industries from retail to real estate to connected homes. He foresaw the footprint of beacon technology to grow fast which was surely becoming too big to ignore. He felt it was time to motivate a team of engineers to work on this technology and get on the bandwagon. In less than five months, the whole idea was transformed into a product that helps businesses increase their revenue by enriching their customer’s shopping experience.
4. Tell us more about the challenges that you have faced in your journey and how did you overcome them ?
BeaconStream uses existing technologies such as Bluetooth low energy to communicate with the smart phones and in this case internet signal quality becomes an important factor. Countries like India really suffer from internet connectivity and we are looking for a third party who can help us in providing high internet services at the venues. The major challenge is that we as Indians always play the wait and watch game for a technology to do well in the U.S market and we slow try to adopt the same apart for our foreseen clients. Even after knowing that the technology will do well in Indian market or even after knowing that the technology is tailor made for Indian market, we still continue to follow the same behavior. This lowers early adoption of any new technology. This was one of the major challenge we faced when we introduced our product in the Indian market
5. What are the future plans of the company ?
With a perfect track record of designing, delivering and deploying innovative mobile solutions for top notch organizations, BeaconStream is on an upward growth trajectory. Claiming a large market share in industries such as hospitality, retail, sports, entertainment, training and M-Commerce; BeaconStream is committed to helping the CIOs leverage the trend of enterprise mobility.
Further the company’s expansion plans include growth through acquisitions and working on various capital raising methods such as private investments and IPO process.
This is a leading edge initiative that the country has seen for the first time. The vision is to brand the zero debt company value to $1 Billion by the year 2020.
