Gimbal CEO Interview

Transcript

• Narration 00:18

  You're listening to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Beacosystem with Steve Statler.

  Jeff Russakow 00:34

  It's basically web analytics for the physical world that this is massive in the digital world. We've had that for 15 years. In the physical world, we have it and half of digital engagements on a mobile phone now. And then we are seeing billions of interactions then with locations we track per month. You can see in 2016, they've set aside budget going into the year and we're just seeing the starter DS get way higher. That's why it's taking all I know we're personally engaged with eight of the top 10 financial institutions in the country.

  Steve Statler 01:15

  So welcome to the fourth episode of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Beacosystem. My name is Steve Statler of Statler Consultng. And we are in San Diego, we're about a mile away from the beach. And I am at the headquarters of Gimbal with Jeff Russakow who is the CEO of Gimbal.

  Jeff Russakow 01:35

  But thanks for having us on your program.

  Steve Statler 01:37

  Yeah, well, we'rereally excited. And we're doing this in partnership with HPE Proxbook, and the idea is we want to give people the opportunity to hear from the leaders of the companies that are at the forefront of proximity and Location, Location technology. IMBEL, a very significant company in that space. If we think about one of the first national deployments of beacons, obviously, Apple stores nationwide, those are Gimbal beacons, you guys have been in the Superbowl, at least twice. In many, many different ministers Super Bowls. There. Yeah. So South by Southwest Citibank, so we'll go back and talk about a lot of these things. But it's great to have an opportunity to talk to someone who's right at the center of this glad to be here. Maybe we should kick off and you can just explain for people that are new to the beacon ecosystem, if you are Gimbal. And what do you do?

  Jeff Russakow 02:31

  Yeah, so Gimbal is a spin out from Qualcomm. So it's actually been around and at scale for for quite a while in the space and had that advantage head start coming out of a large portion company in terms of the technology. We're the leading platform for location proximity, and by that there's a few things. So first, were the most advanced geo fencer. And so I know that we're gonna be talking a lot about beacons. But we really focus on places in general. And so we are by far the most advanced provider of geofencing, in terms of polygonal shapes, which make them more accurate, but very energy efficient. So our Geo fences are on all the time in the background, and therefore have just far superior ability to see when people enter locales. And then we are by far the leader as well, and volume and technology in terms of beacons, and proximity outdoors and indoors. Above that, we offer a much more advanced enterprise scale platform, when you're managing 10 or 30, or 100,000, places rather than just a few, there's actually something to having one person and one desktop one place, or be able to actually manage all that. So that people all the venues don't need to worry about it. We have analytics capabilities over it. And then, in the last six months with the acquisition of a company called Visual we've integrated, we have a really rich experiences engine, which makes it possible to create all kinds of great mobile immersive experiences for consumers over locations. So I think those would be some of the areas and then we clearly have a lot of reach because we're unique in that we are partnered with a very large number of top 100 Mobile publishers, which means that we are able to interact with hundreds of millions of of users extend extend our reach.

  Steve Statler 04:14

  And what do you mean by a publisher?

  Jeff Russakow 04:17

  Shazam might be one good public one I can share. So here's the issue if you if you do if you're serving enterprises, we all are in the space. And you're in the app of that enterprise, Citibank or a leading hotel chain or restaurant chain. There's still only be some minority of people who walk into your restaurant or hotel or bank that have your app. And so you can create this amazing experience for them. But what about the rest? So the way we reach them is by partnering with a lot of top mobile publishers that are most people's apps like Shazam would just be a great example or a fad or many others that we're in. You have the way to still be able to reach out to that phone you can show up as a notification It can be something they can tap and then open up a more immersive experience. But now you have some way to get 6070 80% of the people that come into your hotel lobby, even if it's not as rich as fully checking you in, and then you can use that to serve them as well. And you can also use that to actually give them reasons to download your app to get that better, more immersive experience. So we've seen that that's been one of the most strategic things in the space is how do you get on every device, not every mobile device, every wearable to basically reach hundreds of millions of people and not be dependent on the reach of any one particular enterprises app.

  Steve Statler 05:34

  Yeah, that's really key, isn't it? Because generally speaking, certainly in the past, you had to have an app that had your API's in it in order for beacons to be relevant. And I think people have started off thinking about this pretty simplistically, you have an app, you have a beacon. And someone maybe it's the Macy's app, and they're just kind of thinking about what they're doing. But it actually gets a little more complicated than that. And there's lots of different kinds of players in this space. And I think you guys have really been at the forefront of not just kind of selling some beacons, but trying to build networks.

  Jeff Russakow 06:12

  Yeah, I think we've taken a broader approach. And another good or bad just the way we've viewed the market, I think when I speak, when I think of the beacon community, that it's mostly we have providers that are providing beacons, and therefore proximity. And they've been primarily in just one vertical retail or subsets of retail, like department stores, or grocery stores, or, you know, malls or just specific niches within retail. And their primary business model has been an advertising or a marketplace model only. We've approached a little bit differently in that we're still mostly consumer focus, we don't do a lot of industrial internet of things. But we realized that just as there's one internet, there's not a separate internet for retail versus sports versus hospitality versus travel, there should just be one physical web. And you need to basically be present in all those verticals. So we've always been very broad across retail, hospitality, travel, restaurants, sports movies, we try to be kind of everywhere in the consumer life. And that's why we're also geofencing as well as beacons. And then from a user experience point of view, it shouldn't be just coupons, hit a bubble, get a coupon, especially the minigun, outside retail, almost all experiences are experiences, right? greet me at the restaurant, pop up the menu, order my coffee, when I walk in automatically make the movie theater experience in the game more extra useful, or check me at the hotel, these things are not usually an advertisement. So you need to basically be experiential, and be able to really serve all the different ways in enterprise wants to interact with the consumer, and not just do the advertising part. So we've definitely had the broader profile in terms of what we're doing in a broader business model as a result.

  Steve Statler 08:00

  Let's talk about some of the experiences that you're enabling. So people get get to grips with this. And then maybe we can pry apart some more of who the stakeholders are. But let's look at some use cases first, and like Citibank, you just have an announcement with them. What are you doing with that bank?

  Jeff Russakow 08:17

  You know, they're, we're finding right now, not just that banks, in general, retail branches are trying to really reimagine the entire experience for the user. But in the case of Citi Bank, they're putting in over 30 beacons for store, they're also geofencing their stores. And they really are doing a variety of different use cases. But if I were to give you maybe two or three most simple ones, the first which just got press, which is a very fun one is opening the ATM door, as you approach and to be honest, I never would have thought that'd be the first thing that that would come out of their mouth is the first thing they wanted to do. But it gets to kind of make sense, at least on the east coast, where it's cold, you've got glass lobbies around the ATMs, and there's a door and usually you have to put your wallet or your card and tap it to unlock it. People don't like to do that it's cold outside, there's kind of people right there that don't feel secure. So so the first thing they wanted to do was literally have as you step up to the door, the ability to unlock the ATM lobby door. And you know, for us was a fun one, because by virtue of the fact that Citibank is putting you into their app, and they have 10s of millions of users of their app, from a security point of view, you really have to demonstrate that as an industry. Certainly we've arrived at an enterprise banking level classes security to be able to do that, because you're not only in their secure app, you're unlocking a bank door. Yes, it's an ATM lobby door, it's still a bank door. It's unlocking as you approach other use cases for them, recognizing when high net worth individuals come in, so they might not actually do anything to your phone directly at all, but just if Mr. Jones comes in and he's a large customer, then it might just alert a private banker that Mr. Johnson is coming in, and he should greet him at the door and reconnect. But in general, retail banking is starting to move toward more towards being Wi Fi and small business hub kind of places and reimagine those kind of things. other use cases for banks is as people are starting to try and compete for your payment, you know, different e wallet and loyalty cards to actually prompt people to use this form of loyalty card or that payment as they approach a point of sale. You know, Hey, you forgot to use your such and such loyalty.

  Steve Statler 10:29

  So this is actually out of the branch. I've got the Citibank app, Citibank app might remind me when I'm at a certain Bloomingdale's that I should use their form of tender, something like that. Exactly. And would that be triggered by a beacon or a geofence?

  Jeff Russakow 10:45

  Could be either depending on what makes sense, and like, if you're looking for proximity, very close to a point of sale, it might be a beacon. But you could in some cases, use a geofence. And dwell time, if you do want it to, for example, you might be at a PJ golfing event, right, and you're outdoors on the tent, there might not be any beacon there at all.

  Steve Statler 11:00

  And you guys have done a lot of events here. This talks about the Super Bowl that's South by Southwest. And maybe you could talk about some of the use cases.

  Jeff Russakow 11:12

  I'll give you just maybe a broader, quick snapshot of a bunch of use cases. And then I realized we also got away my apologies from your question about who are the different segments using technology and bank for that, but yeah, so several things. So there's 1000s of use cases. But if I were to first generalize, before we get any vertical, there's really three flavors. The first is a data or know that customer, Amazon knows every person that hits your website, whether they buy anything or not. If I'm a retailer or department store, 70% of the people that walked through my store, I have no idea who they are, or what they looked at whether they bought something or not, you know, if I'm the billboard, I don't know who goes by my billboard every day. So physical venues do are at a massive disadvantage, just knowing who their customers are. There's a whole thematic set of use cases, which is really just the ability know who's walking into my venue, who's my customer? How long were they there, what did they look at this woman went to this department store was there for 31 minutes, it was in the children's section for five and then went to the cosmetics counter, it was in front of this rack for three. It's basically web to its web analytics for the physical world. That just is massive. In the digital world. We've had that for 15 years. In the physical world, we haven't and half of digital engagements on a mobile phone now. So if I'm a marketer, just knowing who my customers are, that data stream got cut off as everyone went outside to the light again, so day to day to data, know that customer. The second thing is experiences, making mobile apps truly mobile, we all say that the stuff on our phone as a mobile app, but what we've really done is taken a PC like app and shrunk it down onto a nice form factor that you can carry around with you. But it's not really mobile, my department, my drugstore app doesn't pop open when I walk through the door and say, Hey, you're in side here. And here's your list of shopping items. And here's your prescriptions and oh, you're on our 12 need BandAids, my coffee does not shop does not automatically take my order as I walked through the door. So mobile apps have not really been mobile, because they're not location proximity aware. So there's just a whole range of things that you can do. That's more of the checking into the hotel, automatically, you're unlocking doors I approach which are making mobile apps, mobile, and that's experiential. And then the third and final then definitely gets more into the world of loyalty and offers and ad tech and things where you may be targeting folks with some kind of a specific offer based on what they're approaching or coming up to. So you're really seeing all three themes. And I would go so far as to say that the adoption order for most enterprises has been in that order. Know your customers are first, you know, without even interacting with them and get smart create really compelling experiences where adoption is going very high, who wants to wait in line for five minutes for coffee every morning, you know, their whole life. So the adoption rate the delight is high. And then as you get to know the customer and their habits better than the start to move to locations and offers, and that's another reason why people have jumped all the way to advertising as their first model may have jumped the market and the customer adoption and the consumer adoption cycle by going to that very limited end use case, which is the hardest use case to to do. Examples within retail knowing who's going through what they're looking at targeting at a product level. Hey, you've been in front of the Tommy Bahama rack specifically for for five minutes, that might be something you're interested in, popping up product information, service information, getting service personnel to come to you because there's very few people on the floor in most retail environments. So I want the orange apron Home Depot to show up because I can't figure this out. And then also as you're approaching point of sale to remind people to use their loyalty or their payment cards, things like that. QSR are any form of you know, coffee or food everyone's bleeding.

  Steve Statler 14:52

  QSR?

  Jeff Russakow 14:54

  Sorry, quick service retail. So if you're thinking about anything from Dunkin Donuts, to Burger King to, you know, whatever it might be. They're all about speed. And they're all moving to border ahead mobile apps, and their biggest issue is making that work. So we've started to see a whole wave of people where hey, you can order your coffee ahead of time, and you're gonna be there in five or seven minutes. But then you get caught in traffic for half hour and coffee is cold. So how do you actually track the person and see when they're actually a quarter mile away to pour the coffee hot? So every form of order ahead, or where people are picking stuff up the service operations breaks if you don't actually track them? Entertainment, venues, sports, movies, etc. Just they're naturally immersive, experiential things. So anything you do to make the game and you know, the the stadium more enjoyable, the museum more enjoyable, hospitality greeting people as they're coming into your resort or your hotel. Those things are just popping like crazy.

  Steve Statler 15:53

  And how can you make a football game more enjoyable with beacons?

  Jeff Russakow 15:57

  Well, if in the case of a stadium, or a venue, there's all kinds of stuff that they love to do first, if you know where people are sitting, you can target them with things, letting them know where their nearest merchandising is, where's the shortest line for hot dogs, helping them think about where to go after the game in terms of what bars or restaurants are, things might be outside.

  Steve Statler 16:15

  But some of those things I don't really need beacons for. I mean, do I need a beacon to know where the shortest line is?

  Jeff Russakow 16:21

  To help me and to help me away find or maybe just find the thing closest to me, or hey, this just around the corner, and maybe in some cases, you surprise people and upgrade their seats, you may let them know that a certain players and a certain location near them doing autographs or mascots, so they tend to be more fun and experiential. A lot of places have like Kid zones or stuff like that before the game and different areas as you come into the commissary. So there are a lot of things that they like to do, which is really just enhancing the personalization of the game of the match or actually the venue that you're you're actually in to make it more enjoyable. And actually, sports has been the earliest adopter of this stuff. Yeah. And that's part of the reason why game was so big. And in sporting, you know, we're pretty much all major league baseball and football, and quite a bit of basketball, hockey and other things. So they were actually the fastest adopters of this technology, because they get that it's all about the experience. While you're while you're at the game.

  Steve Statler 17:16

  That made sense. And what about conventions and things like South by Southwest? Yeah, what does a beacon give me at a convention or South by Southwest?

  Jeff Russakow 17:25

  I think gives you all kinds of things, most important things. So in our case, we integrate with players like event base, which are usually the app associated with that event like South by Southwest. So first just ability for people to find each other away find. So as people start to notice when they go to South by Southwest, or ces or whatever it might be, you can see where somebody else is, and actually way find your way to that person. So given that the primary reason people go to conferences is to network, have the ability to find each other among 10, or 20,000. People at all times is actually very important use case. And then the second thing is capturing people who come by so you know, there's been years where everyone barcode scans you as you come into their vendor booth just to capture your information. Well, if you can automatically capture a person as they walk in, because they're being tracked from a name badge point of view, then your first interaction doesn't need to be kind of objectifying them and barcode scanning them, you can begin by talking about what your company does, yeah. But once again, in the case of South by Southwest, you can also do fun things, not only the conference, but you've got a whole city with 1500 beacons, you can have beer crawls and sponsorships. It's a very fun, fun venue. But we've been doing a lot of event based types of things where the South by Southwest or a dream force or Tribeca Film Festival, there's a lot of event and conference like venues where this is extremely useful, where you're basically tracking people's interactions or bringing them together.

  Steve Statler 18:53

  So let's talk a little bit about where the market is moving the fastest because there's a bunch of different players in the ecosystem. And actually, the interview number three is with Proxima and so they do a lot of out of home advertising. And they've been talking about the advertisers. And you've got the bandanas. You want to just do a quick recap on who? So you threw out a great number there, 30,000 developers, I think this is really useful for people looking at this ecosystem and trying to get a sense of what stage is it at? So we've got a bunch of developers? How big is Gimbal? By other metrics?

  Jeff Russakow 21:52

  Yeah, actually, you caught me putting out a number there and the summon in behind the cameras like scaling. I mean, we tried to avoid giving out a lot of specific numbers, but I will give you some orders of magnitude, a few things. So at this point, the thing that we most would say we'd want to measure is how big is the consumer audience that we're enabling enterprises and brands interact with? I'll just say it's in the hundreds of millions, which is significant, you know, particularly for the size of, say us in North America.

  Steve Statler 22:42

  So hundreds of millions of people have got apps that have beacon API's in them, they may or may not actually be triggering against those beacons. But we know that that.

  Jeff Russakow 22:53

  It's our SDK is supposed to API. But yes, we are embedded within some enterprise or brands app on several hundreds of millions of people's phones, or devices. And then we are seeing billions of interactions with them with locations we track per month. So I'll just leave it at that order of magnitude. And then in terms of locations, I'm not at liberty to say how many locations we track because that's really, we just track what our enterprises customers wishes to. But what I will say in our case is, we track a lot of geo fences, as well as a lot of beacons. So we know that we're very significant share of the total beacon market, but we also have a very significant geofencing footprint. And the reason why I mentioned both is you want to track people and places and not need to worry about whether it's a beacon or a Wi Fi or cell tower or GPS, you just want to be able to say places, there is a general trend where most customers will geofence first and beacon second. And there's a couple of reasons for that. One is until i Master who's going in out of my building, I'm not going to go to the more advanced use case of who's going in and out of the children's department or to cashier 12. The second thing is, is no hardware with geo fences. So what we will typically see is, you know, that bank or whoever will say, Please geofence, all one or 2000 branches, and that's a file and five minutes, the next day it's done. And then they'll start beaconing, maybe the first 100 and start getting smart about those use cases. But I think in general, that's the current state of the market, which is people are in full adoption, you know, rushing toward more advanced in geofencing to get building level accuracy. And they're all over that. And then there may be beaconing, the first 10% of their hotel chain or whatever, and mastering that additional 20 use cases and how to look at the analytics and think about it. And then now through the next couple of years rolling out so 2014 15 are piloting you can see in 2016 They've set aside budget going into the year and we're just seeing the starter deals get way higher, and much more substantial initial deals and Follow on deals according to wait because in 2016 people got educated enough about the stuff they put the money aside to make it a budgeted item. And so that's why it's taking off, but it's going in that order.

  Steve Statler 25:12

  And would you say, Geoffrey Moore's model? Are we in the chasm now?

  Jeff Russakow 25:18

  Yeah, in terms of, you know, and so in terms of jumping the chasm from early adopters to mainstream, I would say geofencing, including our form of more advanced geo fencing has already jumped the chasm, for sure. And then with beacons, I think we are just we've just skipped from the leaders across the chasm to the front edge of mainstream. And so I think, at this point, you're seeing most hotel chains, you know, large ones, most most large retailers, most large entertainment venues are now beacon Ising, if you will, and but they're probably rolling out the first 10 to 20% of their locales here in 2016.

  Steve Statler 25:58

  Well, if we're looking at different industries, and not holding you to specifics, but generally speaking, what proportion of retailers do you think are deploying beacons at the moment?

  Jeff Russakow 26:10

  Market information in this market is still early? I mean, I think you see the same reports that we've seen from third party sources that are not ours either. So we all see the same stuff, about 85% of the top 100. Retailers are adopting beacons here in this year, what we don't know is what percentage of them are doing full blown rollouts versus 200 stores. Whereas I would say that 85% is probably accurate in terms of people doing their first 200, or 1000, stores out of 7000. Because that's real, even if you're full blown adopting. People seem to think or they've forgotten that if you're taking shipment for 100,000 beacons, you're not going to take it on a Tuesday, run deploy on a Wednesday, there's a certain timeframe to roll out. If you have 7000 stores and you're putting or 3000 stores and you're putting at beacons per, that's not going to be any given week, it's going to actually roll over two months. And so I do think the adoption rate is in the kind of numbers people are saying, and then people go, Well, are they fully rolling out? Well, you can basically put the money aside and be fully committed as a top three strategic priority of your retailer, you're going to be rolling out for 18 months, and I've challenged anyone to say that Salesforce and Salesforce automation or payroll systems rolled out any faster. It's not because it's hardware, it's just, it's the rate at which you can basically consume the analytics that you're not producing and do something with it.

  Steve Statler 27:29

  Yeah, I mean, one of the things that you have to deal with is you're essentially taking the world of web analytics and personalization, and you're applying it to the physical world, but the physical world has to be ready to deal with it, they don't suddenly say, oh, we're gonna change our business and start.

  Jeff Russakow 27:45

  It takes some time to consume it. But the what you just said is, that's exactly how we do what we're doing. We're digitizing a web of fIying, the world, the physical world, at least the consumer, physical world, in our case. And so, to me, my analogy is if you know, if I look at even five years ago, the end we said, digital consumer, we're all still picturing somebody at home in their kitchen, looking at a laptop staring at their Facebook feed. And so you're either at home in digital, or you're out in the physical world analog. And five years later, you know, cell phones have gotten so good, so fast. So everything needed to be that the human race went back out into the light. So they're still staring at the darn Facebook feed, but now they're at a restaurant or storage, while they're doing it, and the percentage of people that are now using their stuff in venues almost 100%. So the good news is, you know, 51% of all digital engagement is now on a mobile device. Problem is if you're a marketer, everything went backward. retrograded, five years ago, you are omniscient, You are God, right? You had a consumer going to sites, which will call websites, and you basically knew everything about him, you knew where they were, how long they were there, what product, what pixel, they were looking at, how they got there, and what their journey was, you knew their social graph, and all their friends, you know, all their favorite sites. And you can tie that back to behavioral and demographic data and target them in real time with information offers experiences, whatever. And it's as easy as moving money around in a mutual fund. We've all been doing that for 15 plus years, it's it's a very developed science, then everyone ran outside, okay, well, if they're kind enough to be standing underneath the satellite, technically three satellites in an open space, you can see in the 10s of meters, and with other performance issues, and if they're coming inside, you're seeing them come on and off of Wi Fi or clunky video systems, which are hard to implement, and you're getting maybe back to lagging building level accuracy. You do not know what product level we're looking at. You don't know who the real friends are in the real world, you do not know where they really hang out physically in the real world. And your ability to pull that back in real time tight with other demographic and behavioral data, and then do something actively on their phone and millisecond or 100 milliseconds later, has been not really there. So if you're a marketer half of your ability to get telemetry off of people web analytics off of people went away. So I think as an industry by by G geofencing and beaconing up physical occasions, were making those 200 Macy's or Williamson OMOs or Dunkin Donuts, whatever app like to enter webpages, and will literally just give you back to the marker, the exact same web analytics exact same, as they've been saying for 15 years and can adjust and all the tools and techniques, they've been doing the exact same way versus creating some other channel with another measure, right? That's been the biggest headache of omni channel, a TV radio console or whatever. It's all different measures. Just people want the same measure. And that's exactly what we're doing web analytics for the physical world and do anything with it, that you've been doing the digital world data experiences, offers.

  Steve Statler 30:39

  That's that's a very good analysis. Let's just finish up the discussion about the different verticals. So we got a picture of where retail is here. What are the other verticals that mean?

  Jeff Russakow 30:50

  This vertical adoptions have actually been the experiential ones. So RSA broadly, hospitality Hotelling, transportation, restaurants, financial services of banks, insurance, credit cards, payments, what we call venues and entertainment, so sports, movie theaters, conferences, all the experiential stuff, has actually been the fastest adopting industries by far and the use cases have been experiential. And making mobile apps mobile. Retail is always a little slower. Just retail has never been the fastest adopting industry, whether it be barcode scanners, or conveyor belts. And partly, it's because retail is a thin margin industry compared to some of these others. So I think a lot of people have basically been focused purely on Beacon rollout within retail the last few years. And then I've been trying to figure out if beacons have been rolling out in general, and the answer is they've been rolling out like crazy. But the experiential folks have been the fastest retail now in 2016, is really starting to pop. But if you looked at everyone that was really doing the riots in 1415, not pilots. A lot of them were in all these other experiential industries. And that's where we've seen the biggest pot.

  Steve Statler 31:56

  And so like a portion of sports arenas that have beacons, what would be your guess, professional as opposed to college?

  Jeff Russakow 32:04

  Majority? I mean, I, I'd have to go through at least for the top four major sports, yeah, 90 plus percent. I can't speak for every single one and every single team.

  Steve Statler 32:14

  And then you mentioned financial services, which makes sense. I'm assuming that numbers alot more.

  Jeff Russakow 32:19

  Yeah, right. And I think this year in 2016, it probably be fair to say, I know, we are personally engaged with eight of the top 10 financial institutions in the country. Right now, I'm not ready to share names other than Citibank, which is done some press around one or two use cases. But retail financial services specifically, really come on strong here in 2016, as part of just reimagining the retail banking experience in general, rethinking ATMs rethinking branches, rethinking payment solutions.

  Steve Statler 32:49

  What about healthcare, a lot of money in healthcare, is to make that more efficient that you'll see?

  Jeff Russakow 32:54

  Yeah, actually, we get approached by all kinds of healthcare use cases. Some of them are more asset tracking, which will further out people would like to be able to track that ventilator where it goes around the hospital and know which medical person actually went up and operated it. So we actually get a lot of inquiries around high value use of things that move around and medical things. The other thing that we've seen, which is happening probably most quickly, though, is engaging with consumers in doctor's offices. So I'm sure you've started to notice that most doctors offices today usually have some kind of digital, you know, TV or signage in that that waiting room and they're advertising various, you know, things to you, whether it be medications or treatments or things you should be thinking about depending on which office you're in, those televisions are dumb to who's in front of them. So by veganizing, those, you now have the ability to know who's in front of that display. So you can change the content on that display. And also get a better sense of whether people are staying on the regimen and things like that. There's a lot of waiting time. As we all know, in waiting offices. There's 75,000 doctor's offices out there that have signage in them, as well as many hospitals. And so that's probably the fastest thing we're seeing right now is people trying to improve their ability to provide education or advertisement to healthcare patients, while they're hanging out for 45 minutes in the doctor's.

  Steve Statler 34:17

  I never thought about the waiting room was being a basis for doing out of home advertising. But it is, yeah, I got a couple of things. So just from the point of view of full disclosure, I used to work at Qualcomm. gimble came from Qualcomm, I worked at the NFL.

  Jeff Russakow 34:33

  I actually didn't know that until a couple of minutes before we met.

  Steve Statler 34:38

  And, you know, Gimbal has been helpful to me and I'm just written this book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Beacosystem and Gimbal help not only with some video footage for promotion of it, and also Ray Rotolo and Eric's Yeah, contributed the chapter on out of home advertising. So that's full disclosure that yeah, Let's So enough about me. Let's talk a little bit about you. I mean, in terms of resume, you've got like your dream resume went to Princeton, Princeton, right? Stanford PhD in engineering, mechanical engineering. What was your PhD was?

  Jeff Russakow 35:16

  In robotics, robotics and automation, and including space and underwater robots. So ironically, I was working on indoor navigation 25 years ago, just as part of just you need to have the ability of the robot to see where it's going. So I have colleagues to this day that are still involved in indoor and outdoor GPS. And we literally were making GPS satellites. We call them pseudo. It's the size of like this phone that we're putting indoors, and then trying to figure out how to do the math to use GPS indoors. 20,000 miles to close to the satellite.

  Steve Statler 35:53

  I didn't realize that there's that that you were CXO level in Yahoo some years ago.

  Jeff Russakow 35:59

  Yeah, so as as SAP, Adobe, Symantec, and then Yahoo, which got me much more into internet and digital media as Chief Customer Officer at Yahoo.

  Steve Statler 36:07

  How did you end up a Gimbal?

  Jeff Russakow 36:12

  I lost in poker. No, all kidding aside, looking for the next thing to do, I definitely wanted to do a growth company. And specifically something that's a platform where there's 1000s of applications, you know, anytime you're doing no offense to say payroll software, I'm sure there's a lot of people that enjoy payroll. But when you have something like that there's one use case, right, and you're just selling it again, and again and again. And you're just trying to take market share from a large incumbent. It's really fun when you have something like this, which is more horizontal and platform, but we're only talking to everything from opening ATM doors to like college football to it's a lot more fun when there's there's 1000s of things over a platform. And to me, it was just kind of a no brainer that, hey, you know, we need to digitize the physical world and bring all of our digital capability to the real world. It was just an obviously a large market. So I found that very attractive. And yeah, there was a little deja vu all over again, that 25 years later, you could do something with a $20 beacon that we used to be like, doing PhD stuff on.

  Steve Statler 37:10

  It's crazy stuff. Yeah. So and you you were a McKinsey consultants as long as that Yeah, right. Yeah. So I'm just thinking you must have kind of walked through the door or probably before you walk through the door and started to look at gimble. And what was your assessment of the you know, what was your mini SWOT analysis in your head?

  Jeff Russakow 37:27

  Yeah, so well, obviously, given the comments I just made the markets face the obviously is quite large potential. And just the only challenges are just early market adoption, as opposed to full blown adoption, in terms of of Gimbal was interesting. I, you're so used to attack looking at companies where the commercial story, the sales and marketing vision is so far ahead of the technology, and the technology needs to catch up. And with Gimbal, you actually have the opposite had the opposite problem, which is or this thing was incubated within Qualcomm. The technology is industrial carrier strength and represents a massive amount of investment over many years and many engineers. And so it was under commercialized. And so that's a look, if you're looking to jump in and something good. That's a good thing, right? It's like, wow, this thing actually could be going even faster, growing even faster. It's growing like crazy. But it was all inbound customers that just new Gimbal and new the Gimbal brand, you say beacons a geofence. People say gamble. And they're calling in and you're doing these great deals, and you're like, wow, how much faster and better? Could this thing go if we actually brought real commercial capability to it and greater scale? So as a consultant, that's kind of what I saw it was it was undercover commercialized compared to the speed it could be going at yet.

  Steve Statler 38:40

  How do you commercialize it more?

  Jeff Russakow 38:44

  Well, there's few things. One thing I'll say, and this is partly where I'm glad for what you're doing is, as an industry, and I mean, this is a nice way we have not done it, nearly the level of thought leadership and education as a lot of other industries typically would do. So there really is an opportunity to jump out ahead of the marketing world in particular, and really help educate in all the different ways that location proximity can can really help brands connect and enterprise connect with consumers and kind of lead the way. I don't think anyone the industry has really done a terribly great job of that, because we've mostly been smaller companies. And so we're leaving it to the customer base to kind of discover educate and experiment. So there's an opportunity to really do that. The second thing is just we can just be doing a lot more outbound communication, and all the usual ways and then just we just staffing up, we've been growing our Salesforce like crazy, and going out into more and more verticals. It's just obvious ingredients, obvious results, but it's it's not it's not been anything terribly brilliant. The only thing I'd say that's really maybe interesting is the thought leadership piece, which is as an industry we could be doing a lot more.

  Steve Statler 39:50

  Well, I think one of the things that helps in the industry is when the really big players and Gimbal's a big player in in the beacosystem, but if you look at say an Apple or Google on some Apple sort of lit the the rocket, but then they kind of disappear. And it's like, where's Apple? Do you think they're they've given up on the beacosystem?

  Jeff Russakow 40:10

  Yeah, I literally could not even if I wanted to speculate in terms of you know how Apple's viewing the space, just I mean, they definitely with the lit the fuse to this whole market. And I'm curious to see what their next steps are. Yeah, but I don't have any inside baseball in terms of how they're viewing it. But clearly, there's more iBeacon more open standard iBeacon beacons out there than other open standards out there to this day interested. Yeah, most of our community had been on iBeacon.

  Steve Statler 40:37

  So you look at Google, and it's kind of a double edged sword. And I imagine from Gimbal's perspective, on one hand, you've got this behemoth, who is suddenly got like five sessions in Google IO, that have something to do with technology, which is great. But you ended up dancing with John's party bigger, but how do you avoid getting squashed by them?

  Jeff Russakow 41:00

  Yeah, well, the first two, three quarters is easier in the last quarter, what you just said, but for us, it's awesome. And I for several reasons. The first one, we are still in the the infancy of proximity, including beacons. So having large players, including Google jump in with both feet, and just contribute to getting you know, millions and millions and millions of more beacons out there is wonderful, right? Because we basically want this to be something that's in every venue and every experience for consumers. So it's a rising tide, goodness, it's another great open standard. And they've done a great job with with Eddystone. We are a close partner with with Google as well as Apple, our beacons transmit both iBeacon and Eddystone, as well as some proprietary Gimbal packets. So we've adopted them fully as another open standard. And we've been very happy about it, we all benefit, particularly because we're in a market where there's 1000s of applications, there is plenty of room and the Internet of Things for a lot of different solution providers over the that. So it's been very welcomed for our point of view to have a large players come in.

  Steve Statler 42:03

  But what I see them doing is it in a sense, that kind of commodifying, the beacon market, which arguably was already a commodity by putting these standards in place, they're arguably making it easier to switch from one beacon vendor to the other. And they're also taking one of the things that was Gimbels a real differentiator, which is this secure access to beacons controlling who accesses What do you think people will continue to use the gimble approach to doing that? Or will they switch over and use the Google approach with Eddystone zone, femoral IDs and all that.

  Jeff Russakow 42:41

  So several, he had several questions in there. I'll try and hit them all. First, I think at this point, it's inevitable that in the market, I think a few years ago, this whole thing was really just core based on infrastructure, like hardware and some firmware. I think at this point, we've grown up to full solution capabilities. And it's just inevitable that as the tide rises, we all have to keep adding to our stack. So for us, there's still an unlimited supply of enterprises that need full solutions over whatever staff is there. The second thing is, a lot of enterprises still have a need for their own proprietary solution. And so there's every market, you're in the enterprise segment is always going to be proprietary solutions. But the open standards are extremely helpful for those enterprises who want to avail themselves of it. But for torso and tail, you know, SMB, absolutely. Those open standards. So our experience has been that we're generating more customers as a result of their participation than less. That's a good thing. Yeah. Very good. It's a very big market. But I mean, to answer your question, we are glad to see them actually starting to do more of the encryption security, because our biggest worry has been that people have been deploying open standards. And inevitably, that is not going to be the guy that's like having an internet with no protection. We think everyone should be moving on to encrypted standards, we have no worries about continuing to innovate and continue to have 234 additional features ahead of have that capability. We just think that we need them all to do that.

  Steve Statler 44:12

  Well, I think your time is running out. I could go on for a lot longer, but we'll wrap it up. And we'll end with probably the hardest question that I have on my list of questions, which is, you're going up to the international side.

  Jeff Russakow 44:22

  So I saw that you like gave me this question advanced and I don't have a good answer yet.

  Steve Statler 44:28

  But the question is, what would the three albums be that you took up into space with you? You're up in the International Space Station, and you've got to make some tough choices?

  Jeff Russakow 44:39

  Oh, only three would be hard. So I remember that. I know the artists. So that's I guess it's a great sense of compilation, John Mayer, artist because I play music as well. And I kind of do a lot of acoustic and kind of blues and jazz inspired acoustics. So I just think he's amazing. Stevie Ray Vaughan clearly the greatest blues guitarist or guitar As of all time, and then I'd probably say Jimi Hendrix, who I realized I'm going down a particular chain. But pretty much any great acoustic Singer Songwriter, you could throw any three of those albums and I'd be pretty happy floating around in space with.

  Steve Statler 45:13

  Excellent. Well, we'll give you the box set of from all three of those artists that. Jeff, thank you so much for spending time. It's been really interesting talking to you once again. Thank you.

  Jeff Russakow 45:23

  So thank you. Thank you very much.