Author: jeffyactive
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Digital avatars in meatspace, and the absence thereof
Your mobile phone prompts you with an alert. You excuse yourself from your physical context to enter the digital realm. Is it a relief to escape to cyberspace or rather a nuisance to leave “meatspace”? If you were born in the 20th century, you almost certainly recall the absence of a digital realm. At best…
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Hears Presence
We are becoming cyborgs. We carry smartphones and we wear wearables to enhance our human abilities. It’s not difficult to argue that these have become extensions of ourselves figuratively, if not yet literally. Nor is it difficult to argue that today we still adapt ourselves to interact through our technology rather than the other way…
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Real-time location finds some promising predictions for 2018
The Local Search Association‘s tradition of publishing expert predictions for the New Year is something we look forward to at the start of the year, and we’re excited about what the experts have to say about real-time location in 2018. Beginning with user data, Foursquare‘s Steven Rosenblatt predicts: marketers will turn their focus towards data…
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$500 rectangle meet $5 rectangle
We started 2017 by (optimistically) predicting that a major social network would empower their users to “advertise” their profile to specific physical places they visit. In other words: We expected 2017 to be the dawn of seamless PHYSICAL social networking. We had high hopes for Snap when this year we observed their Spectacles transmitting uniquely-identifiable…
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Light hears ahead of its time
Back in 2013 when the Internet of Things was peaking on the hype-cycle — and all too often described using contrived smart home examples — this was perhaps our favourite way to explain the IoT: You find yourself having to relocate from Montréal to San Francisco, but no sweat. Computers have already identified the things…
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Facebook, it’s time to “share” your view of the customer
At the 2017 Place Conference, on the Rx for Retail panel, Trace Johnson of Total Wine & More eloquently summarised his problem, one faced by so many modern retailers today: “we need a unified view of our customer” And while the panel concluded that there is no single vendor that can offer that solution, conference…
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Creating the next computing industry
How often do you interact with computers in a day? Likely on more occasions than you can count or even recognise! Can you remember a time when you didn’t interact with computers on a daily basis? We’ve just added to our bibliography The Dream Machine, which recounts in splendid detail the history of interactive computing.…
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The next ambitious 5-year plan
To celebrate the five-year anniversary of reelyActive’s incorporation, we compiled the significant milestones of our history. Looking back at our origins, when our mission was to create the first simple and accessible cloud-based active RFID system we were reminded of the problems we were solving in 2012, namely: A commercially-proven active RFID standard had yet…
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Can you measure real-world behaviour using tools designed for the web?
Google Analytics for the real world. Several companies have self-identified as such. We ourselves have written a blog post entitled Google Analytics for the Physical World. But what happens when you literally run real-world behaviour data through tools designed for the web? The above screenshot shows what happens when we do exactly that, using…
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Fear Not Distribution that Works
We recently attended the inaugural Digital Future of Work Summit at NYU where Michael Chui, Partner at the McKinsey Global Institute emphatically responded to a question saying: I’m more afraid of income inequality than I am of Skynet! Two weeks later, we attended the IEEE RFID Conference in Phoenix where Professor Katina Michael equally emphatically…
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