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" MIAMI\u2014You probably would not notice the cream-colored boxes stuck to the ceilings, posts, and walls around Sun Life Stadium, home of the Miami Dolphins, unless somebody pointed them out to you. Even then, the little rectangles could pass for smoke alarms. In fact, they are Gimbal beacons built by Qualcomm, and each one beams out a particular message via Bluetooth to your iPhone, one that can be tailored to reach only people at a specific location. Welcome to the location-focused future of marketing. PopMech got an up-close look at what these Gimbal beacons can do during yesterday&amp;#039;s Dolphins win over the New England Patriots. For the launch demo, Qualcomm placed 50 beacons around the stadium and created a geo-fence around Sun Life. eMbience developed an iPhone app called Dolphins Pass (Qualcomm promises Android integration is coming in early 2014). Once users download the app, agree to the terms, and allow Dolphins Pass to know their location and send them push notifications, they&amp;#039;re ready to receive alerts and offers. Walk up to the stadium, for instance, and a &amp;quot;Welcome to Sun Life&amp;quot; message buzzes your phone. Swipe it and the app opens with a welcome video about the stadium. That message goes out to any Dolphins Pass user within the geo-fence, as do others, including the warning just before the end of the third quarter that alcohol sales were about to end. But several are specific to a microlocation. The team store, for instance, has a beacon that will offer users a percentage discount on Dolphins merchandise. The Dan Marino statue has a beacon that will offer to show highlights of number 13&amp;#039;s career. And if you&amp;#039;re standing in the concession line, trying to buy that last beer before sales conclude, you&amp;#039;ll receive an alert suggesting you try the stand at another particular section where the lines are shorter. It all works rather seamlessly\u2014as long as your phone doesn&amp;#039;t run out of juice.  Unavoidably, there is going to be a creep-out factor for some people as this kind of location-aware service grows. Yes, we may be accustomed to the idea that companies and governments have our data and track our location, but it&amp;#039;s another thing to be reminded of that so viscerally. Qualcomm was certainly aware of this as its reps explained the Gimbal privacy features to the reporters on hand. Technology such as the Dolphins Pass will be strictly opt-on, they stressed. You&amp;#039;ve got to download the app and agree to the terms before you receive any message. Gimbal beacons send only secure, encrypted information packets, says Mike Barboni, Qualcomm&amp;#039;s senior director of product management. And the Sun Life beacons only transmit their code every 10 seconds\u2014they don&amp;#039;t receive or record any data, though Barboni says Gimbal beacons can be set to send and receive. With Gimbal hardware, Qualcomm is competing with Apple and others to dominate this burgeoning location-aware space. The tech is of great interest to brick-and-mortar stores that want to offer deals and special treatment to customers within the store, or even to those at a particular display (Gimbal is accurate to within about a foot). Beacons won&amp;#039;t be used exclusively for marketing, either. For example, Qualcomm says museums want to get in on the act, using beacons to send information about the very painting you&amp;#039;re staring at right to your phone, rather than having to lend you one of those audio-tour handsets. It&amp;#039;s working with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on such a setup right now. And the setup is inexpensive. Qualcomm will sell its smaller, Series 10 beacons for as low as $5, depending on the volume you buy. The larger Series 20s cost as little as $10 apiece. They have a battery life of more than a year because of the low power demands of Bluetooth. The potential is there. If anything, what holds back location-aware services might be the same paranoia factor that could stop the advance of domestic drones or humanoid autonomous robots. It&amp;#039;s just too weird to get unsolicited messages from a beacon that knows your exact location, plus marketers would bombard your device with offers if they could. So, location-aware services must be opt-in. But that requires a few extra steps of planning. You&amp;#039;ve got to know to download the app in advance and approve the alerts, which takes the serendipity out of the experience. Thus, location services seem like an ideal way not to find new customers but to offer the personalized, VIP treatment to existing ones. That much was clear during one of Qualcomm&amp;#039;s final demos, in which senior director of business development Brian Dunphy approached a bar in the VIP lounge, prompting a bold &amp;quot;Welcome, Brian&amp;quot; message to flash up on the TV screen. Imagine, he says, if people working for the Miami Dolphins concierge receive a Bluetooth alert that a VIP season ticket holder is walking into their section, an alert complete with that person&amp;#039;s photo and bio so the staffer can find them and offer personalized service. Personalization won&amp;#039;t be simply for pampering the 1 percent, either. Barboni says that at the Qualcomm office, a beacon at the coffee bar recognizes his phone, which he&amp;#039;s linked to his credit card. The system asks him whether he&amp;#039;d like his usual, the Americano; if he says yes, it simply charges his card.  Just after the Dolphins defense intercepted Tom Brady&amp;#039;s pass in the end zone to seal the win over the Patriots, my phone buzzed: &amp;quot;Drive Home Safely.&amp;quot; A little generic, perhaps, but a reminder of what&amp;#039;s to come. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/reviews/a9906/qualcomm-gimbal-the-future-is-here-reminding-you-that-beer-sales-are-ending-soon-16274861/>