rusty0101's Journal: comercial uses for 802.15....

I walk at one of my local shopping malls. This mall is two stories, four corner stores, and perhaps a hundred smaller shops. Two and a half times around the perimiter of the inner courts is approximately a mile, so someone could provide complete 802.11b coverage with about 15 APs. (one for each floor of the corner stores, one at each corner of each floor of the central court, then one near the middle of the central court.)

So, I was thinking, Ok, Is this something I could convince the mall management to buy into? Besides the cost of the Access Points, I would have to include wiring, as well as supporting infrastructure. Something like four five port hubs and an eight port hub someplace to home run this to a set of servers, and the requisite Internet access. On top of that, ongoing maintenance costs, equipment will fail, someone will have to deal with delinquents trying to break into the servers. Plus the marketing costs involved. What would be worth providing this type of service?

About the only thing that I could come up with was a shopping pim. This would be a device variable in size, between the size of a pager, and a palm or jornada. It would come with the standard contact and time management tools, as well as a few social tools and games such as instant messaging and perhaps a group oriented varient of nethack. This would also depend upon the form of the device. However all of them would have two apps one is basically a shopping list management app, the other (which can interact with the former) is a store mapping program.

Ok, so far so good. Unfortunately we still haven't given the mall or the stores any major incentive to support this. That will take a bit more work. My initial thought was to have either the shopping app, or the store mapping app (or both) interact with a server to help shoppers figure out where what they were looking for would be located. In addition, the stores could update the devices with any specials that the shopper has indicated an interest in. The devices could be set up so that they would replace the pagers that some mall resturants use when they have too many people waiting for a table. "Why Mr. Smith, I see you are one of the malls premier customers, do you have your Shopim with you? Wondeful! We will send you an IM-Page when we have a table for you. Would you like a copy of the menu on your Shopim to look over at your convienence? Yes it will have the specials for the day. Thank you. You can even give us advance notice of what looks good to you, and it can be ready when your table is."

Ok, perhaps a bit beyond what a resturant would like to do, but you get the picture.

Unfortunately there is a problem. This really only helps the corner stores, and possibly the resturants. There is not much of an incentive for the center court stores to be involved. Why not? Because they are target market stores, and they know that their ads would be at or near the bottom when compared to the corner store ads.

Let's say that one of the corner stores is Sears. They are in just about every shopping mall anyway, and you can find just about anything you want there as well. What incentive does Perl Vision have to use this network if their ads for $99 glasses second pair free, are going to be hidden by the ad for whatever optomitrist is working in the Sears store?

A worse problem is that on a busy day, there may be a couple of hundred devices vieing for bandwidth.

That's where 802.15 comes in. This is the bluetooth spec as interpreted by IEEE. The range of bluetooth is about 10 meters. which nicely matches the width of th halls, and the width of a storefront in the center court. Let's say that every store gets an 802.11 to 802.15 converting access point. If they store has more than 20 meters of storefront, they get a second, or third, or whatever additional range is needed. They will be billed a nominal charge for these repeters, but it will be small in comparison to the rest of the rent. If they are really small, and their storefront is covered by their neighbors, they can even opt out.

Now to make it something that will start to earn money from the product. It is well known that 80% of a stores profit comes from 20% of it's customers. This may not be true for a drug store, but is an understatement for several well respected department stores. If you know that how much one of your major customers spends depends upon how they are treated, how much would it be worth to be aware that they are aproaching? Giving you time to have your best sales leads where they need to be.

For the remainder of the customers, how much is it worth to you if they agree to give you their shopping list so you can perhaps help them discover that you have some of the things they didn't expect you to have? Likewise is it of value to be able to put an ad on a potential customer's shopim because they are near your store? Especially if you are a new store to the mall, and perhaps you know the customer is interested in some of your products but isn't aware that you carry them at a steep discount.

In the mall I walk (and shop) at, there is a large center court. Normally this might be of concern to such a plan, but I have a couple of ideas for dealing with this. First is that asside from someone sitting chatting with someone else, people don't spend all that much time sitting in the center court. Anything like an IM-Page can be queued for the couple of minutes someone might be walking through the court. Also if there are people sitting in the court, some of the seating is going to be in range of one of the APs, and this could be the boundry of an ad-hoc network that would provide necessary coverage.

Then again, this is all just speculation....

I can envision a similar setup for grocery stores, DIY stores like Lowes, Home Depot, Menards, and so on.

Then again, perhaps just wishfull thinking....