Apple is aggressively focusing on indoor cartography in order to compete with Google’s venue mapping efforts. And it appears that Apple is ahead of Google, because of the iBeacon technology that it has been planting in venues for some time.

“iBeacons don’t specifically create indoor maps,” Jim Edwards wrote for Business Insider. “Rather, Apple appears to be hoping to persuade building owners to upload a map of their space, and then iBeacons could in theory be used to automatically validate the map’s accuracy as iPhones receive their signals. That automation would be a huge step—currently, Google is validating its indoor maps by hand, using a human to check each uploaded map, we’re told.”

Edwards wrote that there’s a fortune to be made in the indoor maps race.

“Indoor maps could be even more lucrative, because users are just a few inches from the products being sold and the checkout where they pay for them,” Edwards wrote. For example, “iBeacons will let marketers know that a shopper is in the candy aisle, looking not just at the chocolate display, but at the milk-chocolate-macadamia-nut section. It’s that precise.”

Please read the Business Insider article for the full story, and let us know your thoughts about indoor mapping in your venues.

(photo credit: IntelFreePress via photopin cc)

There was a lot of news this past week. Here are some stories that caught our eyes.

This Mascot’s Sweet Surprise for a Deaf Fan at the Ballpark was a Grand Slam of Awesomeness
—The Huffington Post
Hunter Samworth, 7, is deaf and a huge fan of Heater, the mascot for the Dayton Dragons, a minor league baseball team in Ohio…”

SEC OKs Use of More Cowbell, In-stadium Music for Football
—AL.com
“Mississippi State is at the center of the legislation, which the SEC believes will help ‘enhance the fan experience and provide institutions with the flexibility to appeal to their fans by the use of music and institutionally controlled noise.'”

Have We Reached The End Of The Line For The Conference Call?
—NPR
“Humans have put a man on the moon, harnessed the atom and built supercomputers that can perform quadrillions of calculations per second. But try to get five people with telephones talking to each other and our high-tech society can break down.”

6 Reasons to Talk to Strangers About Your Work
—Forbes
“What can having conversations with people in our ‘outer circle’ do for your business?

How Google Glass Could Change the Way We View Art
—The Independent
“A team from Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) is investigating how Google’s new wearable computers can be used to display instant information on artworks as visitors walk round museums, possibly replacing gallery guidebooks and audio guides entirely.”

(photo credit: OhKyleL via photopin cc)

The color blue is known to have a calming effect and can spark creativity. Now, let’s add hunger to that list.

According to a new study, blue-enriched light exposure was associated with an increase in hunger 15 minutes after light onset and still lingered two hours after the meal. Blue light also decreased sleepiness and contributed to higher measures of insulin resistance.

“It was very interesting to observe that a single three-hour exposure to blue-enriched light in the evening acutely impacted hunger and glucose metabolism,” said study co-author Ivy Cheung, a doctoral candidate in the Interdepartmental Neuroscience program at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois. “These results are important because they suggest that manipulating environmental light exposure for humans may represent a novel approach of influencing food intake patterns and metabolism.”

So, the next time you have an event and there is some leftover food you’d like to have eaten, just wash the room with some blue light.

(photo credit: On Stage Lighting via photopin cc)

Imagine if your venue could adapt to your guests’ emotional states. That may seem like fantasy, but one group is working on it.

The STAN (Science Technology Architecture Networks) research project is exploring whether buildings can reflect human emotions. The group created a Twitter-reactive garden of articulating steel structure that is controlled by people’s responses via Twitter when they use the hashtag #gardenup.

“The garden essentially points to a future in which buildings could modify themselves in response to monitoring our emotional state via social media,” said Richard M. Wright, senior lecturer at the Lincoln School of Architecture in England. “For example, if we feel like wearing a big cosy jumper and sipping a cup of boiling hot soup, it will turn the temperature down and open a window. Buildings may also begin to reflect the mood of a populace by changing color or shape, constantly remapping our perception of our urban environment, with facades becoming animated, reflective, and mobile in response to communal desires and emotions.”

The STAN project will be making its first public appearance at the Garden Up horticultural event in Sheffield, England, June 7-8. You can also follow @thestanproject on Twitter to learn more about the project.

(Image: The STAN project)

Two of our member venues have received Google Glass to experiment with in order to learn about the pros and cons of the technology when using it in a facility. We’ll be following their progress on the blog here and in FM magazine. This first blog post is written by Ruth Fajardo and Alex Hargis from the AT&T Performing Arts Center in Dallas, Texas.

OK, Google Glass…

Those are the command words you speak to enter the user interface for Google Glass, the latest embodiment in the next technological movement of wearable smart devices. The product is a pair of glasses that houses all the foundational inner workings of a smartphone. Google Glass allows the user, through voice command prompting or a miniature track pad, to make phone calls, record videos, take pictures, share content to Facebook/Twitter, surf the Web, process email, and find the nearest barbecue joint using GPS. All of these functions are visualized through a tiny prism embedded in a Robo Cop-esque eyepiece, allowing you to replicate essentially all your smartphone dependent tasks hands-free. The cutting edge technology harkens to Orwellian-like scenes from Minority Report or Brave New World, where with a few simple directives to a “Dave” or with a couple swishes of your hand you can begin flying a megaton, class A, intergalactic starship destroyer. Or at least that’s what the expectations around this piece of technology feels like. And if you can leverage this technology to zip around the cosmos, surely you can get it to sync with your menu boards at the bars to promote drink specials and raise your per caps, right?

Wrong. Well, who knows? Maybe it could. Maybe we think we’re in possession of a deluxe Swiss army knife and all we really have at this point is a really sharp stick. This is where we at the AT&T Performing Arts Center (PAC) in Dallas, Texas, is going to begin our journey. Even though the product is sleek, sexy, and comes with a litany of features that tittle the techie in all of us, we want to put it through the ringer and find out if we have the multipurpose tool of our dreams…or a stick. A really, really good looking and functional stick. Let’s not dog on a good ol’ fashioned stick.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be conducting a series of case studies to judge how this “face computer” can work for our campus in fun, creative, and useful ways. Our marketing department will have Glass first to try out the recording function for an artist POV. Glass will then run the gamut of front of house, security, production, and back to operations for data compiling. And while we embark on this journey, we’re going to document everything and ask a heck of a lot of questions. One of our biggest concerns is how our patrons will perceive, say, our patron services staff supervisors wearing Glass, and how will venues perceive Google Glass when they start appearing on the faces of our patrons? Would you allow the newest, smallest, publicly-available wearable technology in your venue? What’s the ROI on this technology if you have to provide it for all of your security supervisors? What privacy laws are potentially being infringed upon? Can you consider the purchase of this equipment as a capital expenditure line item?

The staff at the AT&T PAC is incredibly excited to dive into the unknown world of wearable technology. We hope the data collected from this pilot program can be shared to help lay a foundation for the usage of wearable technology and to identify the warning flags from its presence and help our colleagues mitigate associated risk. We just got our pair this past week and have already put in the hands of our IT director with the detailed instructions to “figure this thing out” and let us know some ground rules before issuing to departments. As we make headway into our case studies, we look forward to sharing our results and feedback. Hopefully there will be much revelation to balance out the overwhelming frustration of trying to make one piece of technology solve every problem that has ever plagued the venue management industry. So, here’s to the future. All we have to do is put it on, cross our fingers, and say, “OK, Google Glass…”

VIDEO: Pianist Andre’ Watts wore AT&T PAC’s Google Glass during a rehearsal for his recital in the Winspear Opera House.

(photo credit: Thomas Hawk via photopin cc)