Gimbal beacons spun off into standalone company
So hot is the market for beacons in retail environments that Qualcomm has spun off its own platform into a standalone business unit based around its Gimbal technology.
The company has signed an agreement with a group of outside investors to turn its existing subsidiary, Qualcomm Retail Solutions, into an independent entity, controlled by the third party backers but with Qualcomm retaining a stake and being the technology provider. It will be named after its key asset, Gimbal. The investors include a mixture of strategic and venture capitalist players, among them the i-Hatch LBS Fund, which has participants such as barcode/RFID specialist Zebra Technologies and AEG. Other investors were not named, and Qualcomm said its own stake remains a ‘substantial minority’.
The spin-off will give the new firm bigger resources to build a business around the Gimbal beacons, and greater freedom of action to develop that, even when it involves competing with important Qualcomm chip customers such as Apple with its iBeacons.
The chip giant has made moves like this before, with varying degrees of success ‘ for instance, with its Qualcomm Life health and fitness venture. The underlying aim is always to expand the reach of mobile connectivity and therefore of Qualcomm’s chips, as well as establishing new sources of patent licensing revenue. However, the retail move also reflects the firm’s increasing interest in technologies which fall well outside its traditional core markets, as it seeks to offset the decline in its IPR position in handsets (as CDMA-based technologies give way to LTE and royalty rates are reduced). This sees Qualcomm’s mighty R&D machine being focused on all kinds of surrounding markets in order to establish patent and product revenues in areas of potential growth such as the internet of things.
The use of proximity beacons to support applications such as personalized marketing, hyperlocal search and mobile payments is one of those growth segments, especially in retail outlets. Qualcomm entered the space only in December when it unveiled Gimbal, which uses low energy Bluetooth Smart to pinpoint users within one foot, whether indoors or outdoors. In line with Qualcomm’s strategy of building whole platforms around its hardware, as with AllJoyn, it also offers the Gimbal Manager back end software, and various applications.
Rocco Fabiano, president of Qualcomm Retail Solutions, said at the time: ‘Given the affordable pricing of the beacons, retailers and venue operators can install a network for customer engagement that is both more accurate and less expensive than other location-based systems.’
‘Enabling proximal, contextually relevant experiences is an important element of our vision to bridge the digital and physical worlds across retailing, advertising, social networking and other use cases, and Gimbal Inc. is well positioned to continue to drive industry leadership,” said Derek Aberle, Qualcomm’s president, in a statement about the formation of the new entity. “Qualcomm often serves as a catalyst for creating businesses and technology that enable new and unique user experiences.’
Gimbal was developed inhouse as a context-aware proximity platform, supporting what its creator likes to call the ‘digital sixth sense’. It comes with a software developers’ kit for iOS and Android, enabling brands and retailers to create applications to lure their customers.
The past year or so has put a bright spotlight on indoor positioning and navigation. The majority of mobile data activity takes place inside, and service providers are keen to deliver services based on the location of those users ‘ whether targeted promotions in malls, augmented reality information about museum exhibits, or a host of other applications. However, GPS has poor indoor penetration and Wi-Fi is an incomplete solution, so there is a race to define new technologies and standards for micro-location.
Bluetooth is increasingly being adopted as the protocol of choice, since GPS is inaccurate when indoors, and NFC is less widely supported in handsets, and requires customer action, such as tapping a phone on a tag, to activate. As for the infrastructure, some options are small cell-based, such as ip.access’s recently announced Presence Cell, but beacons have grabbed many of the recent headlines, partly because of Apple’s enthusiasm (and the interesting applications it runs in its own stores), partly because of the low cost.
Gimbal beacons cost as little as $5 each in large quantities. There are two sensors on offer. The smaller Series 10 measures 28 x 40 x 5.6 millimeters while the Series 20 is 95 x 102 x 24 millimeters. Brands using the platform can send customized communications based on knowledge of the consumer’s interest, derived from geofence triggers and proximity triggers.
There are start-ups hurrying into the micro-location space too. Most recently, Estimote raised $3.1m in seed funding for its wireless beacon sensors, with backers including Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Betaworks and Bessemer Venture Partners. The start-up is piloting its technologies with large US and European retailers, it says.
Qualcomm foresees super-smart mobile devices with Zeroth ‘brain chip’
It may sound like something out of a 1960s sci-fi movie, but Qualcomm’s ‘brain chips’ are due to go commercial as early as next year, says the firm.
It has been working on the Zeroth neuromorphic chip platform, which claims to mimic the way the brain works, and could be a significant new source of revenues and IPR power if its neural networking techniques really can solve some of the challenges facing robotics. The aim is to create a widely applicable ‘neural processing unit’ (NPU) to perform the core functions to support activities such as deep learning, in the same way that a GPU supports key underlying functions to drive graphics. It feels like a long term bet ‘ and an area where Intel is also active ‘ but the pay-off could be huge if neural networking, after so many false dawns, becomes mainstream in the internet of things, and if Qualcomm establishes the leading platform to deliver it.
Those are two big ‘ifs’, but Qualcomm has created the base platform and is now signing up research institutes to test the chips ahead of commercial implementation. Zeroth is part of a broad neural networking R&D activity at the San Diego giant, and is named after writer Isaac Asimov’s zeroth law of robotics ‘ that ‘a robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm’.
Its first public demonstration, reported by MIT Technology Review, features a small robot called Pioneer, which rolls up to a Captain America action figure, picks it up with a scoop and pushes it towards three pillars. The robot ‘sees’ a Qualcomm engineer pointing to one of the pillars, and duly sets the action figure down in that place. It then takes a second figure and puts it in the same place, having ‘learned’ the right location. It is also able to distinguish between the dolls and other objects, which it ignores.
The difference between this and object recognition technologies is that the robot also takes action based on what they see. That is a key feature of many neural networking and neuromorphic R&D programs targeting computing devices such as smartphones, as well as robotics. IBM Research and HRL Labs are both separately working on neuromorphic chips for DARPA, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, according to the MIT publication, while the European Union is backing a 10-year Human Brain Project, which aims to make core contributions to neuroscience, medicine and future computing.
Google has been the most high profile investor in robotics for mobile consumer purposes, with the purchase of Boston Dynamics and others. Its main interest is to drive entirely new methods of web-based search and interaction, based on deep learning, and so to enable new services which will deliver the user data that is Google’s lifeblood. Qualcomm’s objective will be different ‘ to extend its chip technology and patents into areas where it can shape future standards.
While there are many futuristic applications based around robots, in the nearer term, Zeroth could be used in an area where the company has already been highly active, medical and fitness monitoring ‘ not only tracking a person’s vital signs through a wearable gadget, but taking action in response, such as adjusting medication.
Perhaps the most important short term use will be to contribute to the ongoing battle to make the search experience ever smarter. Apple Siri and Google Now rely on voice recognition and artificial intelligence to provide new levels of smart response to user queries, and will be further enhanced by gesture recognition, rich machine learning platforms and, perhaps, by Qualcomm’s NPUs, embedded in handsets. “If you and your device can perceive the environment in the same way, your device will be better able to understand your intentions and anticipate your needs,” Samir Kumar, a business development director at Qualcomm’s lab, told MIT Technology Review.
But these technologies have a long way to go to become mainstream ‘ they need to be affordable, have compelling and easy-to-use applications, and to be easily programmable. CTO Matthew Grob commented: “We’re blurring the boundary between silicon and biological systems.’ This was a claim being made by neural computing developers 25 years ago, and their impact, outside a few esoteric academic or defense projects, was minimal. Blurring those lines is clever, and even a bit scary, but it needs a real business case just like any other technology.