Empowering the Intelligence of Things with Sirqul, an IoT Engagement-As-A-Service Platform

As seen in The Sil­ver­Log­ic

Post­ed March 5, 2018 by Rory Michaels

Thus far on our blog and in our forth­com­ing Busi­ness Appli­ca­tions of the Inter­net of Things whitepa­per, we’ve looked most­ly at the sheer scope and scale of the IoT: How big it is, what it’s worth, how much data it col­lects, and how to keep the whole sys­tem safe. But like all path­break­ing move­ments in tech­nol­o­gy, the IoT is at its best when it’s fun­da­men­tal­ly chang­ing the ways indi­vid­u­als and busi­ness­es oper­ate at a gran­u­lar lev­el. One of the IoT’s most promis­ing aspects has to do with decou­pling and decen­tral­iza­tion: Devices that can gath­er infor­ma­tion and talk to each oth­er in small, mod­u­lar net­works that don’t need to con­nect to the cloud or the broad­er inter­net as a whole. Some of the most inno­v­a­tive com­pa­nies in the IoT space rec­og­nize this, and have been qui­et­ly devel­op­ing high­ly-spec­i­fied prod­ucts and ser­vices that can be used by an enor­mous range of busi­ness­es and indi­vid­u­als to make things bet­ter, faster, and eas­ier.

That’s the idea behind Seat­tle-based Sirqul (pro­nounced “cir­cle”), a so-called ‘Engage­ment-as-a-Ser­vice” IoT plat­form that focus­es on what founder Rob Fred­er­ick calls the “Intel­li­gence of Things.” Sirqul doesn’t just turn analog devices smart for the sake of nov­el­ty; they think deeply about how increased con­nec­tiv­i­ty between objects in the envi­ron­ment can help to dri­ve engage­ment, oper­a­tional effi­cien­cy, rapid inno­va­tion, and new rev­enue streams for busi­ness­es.

“Think of it this way: WiFi is all about through­put. You stream video and the human is active­ly using it. IoT is more about the things that are hap­pen­ing with­out the user,” says Fred­er­ick. “You don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly need video but you need to report the tem­per­a­ture, whether the light is on, whether there’s presence…if someone’s stand­ing near­by or if some­one needs some­thing or needs to move to a dif­fer­ent spot.”

The­se are the kinds of sim­ple bits of infor­ma­tion that can be enor­mous­ly valu­able to a com­pa­ny that is clev­er enough to col­lect and ana­lyze them: Sirqul works on spaces like retail stores, work­places, and sta­di­ums to col­lect and ana­lyze huge amounts of data in real-time and to mod­i­fy and opti­mize the envi­ron­ment accord­ing­ly. Most impor­tant­ly, they do much of this with­out upload­ing to WiFi or the larg­er cloud archi­tec­ture, instead rely­ing on local device-to-device net­works and edge com­put­ing to max­i­mize the speed and effi­cien­cy of all the num­ber-crunch­ing.

Sirqul has devel­oped a wide range of APIs and offers white label, turnkey solu­tions for busi­ness­es in ver­ti­cals as diverse as heavy indus­try and enter­tain­ment. As broad as their offer­ings are, the core of their oper­a­tion are two class­es of patent­ed hard­ware devices, Avatar
and Edysen. The hard­ware seems to reflect the vision of Sirqul’s founder, who got his start work­ing on the tech­nol­o­gy that would even­tu­al­ly become Blue­tooth.

Avatar is essen­tial­ly a bea­con that can be installed in any space in order to col­lect and aggre­gate infor­ma­tion from oth­er near­by devices, includ­ing mobile phones, blue­tooth-capa­ble devices, and oth­er near­by bea­cons. A clus­ter of bea­cons essen­tial­ly cre­ates a mod­u­lar local­ized net­work that is able to do most of its com­put­ing with­out the lag time asso­ci­at­ed with tra­di­tion­al cloud com­put­ing, which trans­lates to rapid feed­back and ana­lyt­ics capa­bil­i­ties for the busi­ness run­ning the sys­tem.

Image: Sirqul 

Edysen is essen­tial­ly a device that can be installed in any space in order to col­lect and aggre­gate infor­ma­tion from oth­er near­by BLE and WiFi enabled devices, includ­ing mobile phones. A clus­ter of devices essen­tial­ly cre­ates a mod­u­lar local­ized net­work that is able to do most of its com­put­ing with­out the lag time asso­ci­at­ed with tra­di­tion­al cloud com­put­ing, which trans­lates to rapid feed­back and ana­lyt­ics capa­bil­i­ties for the busi­ness run­ning the sys­tem.

Image: Sirqul 

 Use Case: Carrefour Taiwan and Sirqul’s First Smart Retail Store

Sirqul recent­ly announced a major part­ner­ship with Car­refour Tai­wan on a sin­gle-store smart retail pilot, and the project pro­vides an inter­est­ing win­dow into just how trans­for­ma­tive a well thought out, intel­li­gent IoT infra­struc­ture can be for even sin­gle-site retail oper­a­tions.

Image: Car­refour

In a press release from Sirqul announc­ing the part­ner­ship ear­ly this year, Rami Baitieh, CEO of Car­refour Tai­wan, high­light­ed how Sirqul’s com­bi­na­tion of smart, fast hard­ware and inno­v­a­tive API solu­tions would make for a more engag­ing con­sumer expe­ri­ence in the pilot store:

“To under­stand shop­per behav­iors means quick­ly and accu­rate­ly ana­lyz­ing many data sets to sep­a­rate the noise from mean­ing­ful signals.These insights will orches­trate action in real-time – whether that means per­son­al­iz­ing the mobile expe­ri­ence, alter­ing in-store dis­plays, or repo­si­tion­ing prod­ucts with­in the store.”

Sirqul brought a host of new capa­bil­i­ties to the retail site that, becaus of the mod­u­lar way in which Sirqul’s tech­nol­o­gy stacks are assem­bled, would be rel­a­tive­ly easy to scale if the oper­a­tion proves effec­tive. The expe­ri­ence is built on Sirqul’s Aileen, its spe­cial­ized API for retail that retains many of the base fea­tures found across all of the company’s core APIs. Aileen han­dles vir­tu­al­ly every lev­el of the cus­tomer engage­ment expe­ri­ence, from nav­i­ga­tion to pay­ments to adjust­ing how the store looks and oper­ates based on real-time data.

Image: Sirqul 

For Carrefour, Sirqul emphasizes a few key areas in which their platform is enhancing consumer engagement:

• Real-Time Alerts — New mobile apps and web dash­boards that enable oper­a­tions to visu­al­ize insights, but more impor­tant­ly take action to engage cus­tomers and man­age staff posi­tions. When a cus­tomer is stand­ing in an aisle for sev­er­al min­utes, a trig­ger will noti­fy staff to engage. When lines start to queue, an alert will prompt more POS lines to open.
• Reduc­tion of Food Spoilage — Inte­gra­tion with tem­per­a­ture mon­i­tor­ing devices will track the open­ing and clos­ing of refrig­er­a­tors, cool­ers, and freez­ers. By mon­i­tor­ing events and receiv­ing alerts, stores can save mon­ey by reduc­ing waste and pre­vent­ing spoilage.
• Mak­ing a scal­able sys­tem that’s ‘Future-Proof’ – The solu­tion pro­vides a path to scale across all stores, flex­i­bil­i­ty to incor­po­rate addi­tion­al func­tion­al­i­ty, and the abil­i­ty to antic­i­pate enhance­ments that have not been installed to-date.

Sirqul spent years devel­op­ing the scope of its tech­nol­o­gy, build­ing an extreme­ly diver­si­fied range of API offer­ings and inter­op­er­a­ble devices that are just now begin­ning to see the light of day in malls, sta­di­ums, and oth­er large pub­lic venues. The com­pa­ny is a great exam­ple of how some of the core ideas behind IoT can be applied in sim­i­lar ways in very dif­fer­ent indus­tries while still being high­ly cus­tomiz­able to fit indi­vid­u­al use cas­es.

Sirqul is a com­pa­ny that evan­ge­lizes the Intel­li­gence of Things — how con­nect­ed devices can make every­thing smarter, and on Wednes­day we’ll look more in depth at the company’s founder Rob Fred­er­ick, who has been think­ing about how tech­nol­o­gy can be used to engage indi­vid­u­als and opti­mize expe­ri­ences since his under­grad­u­ate days at MIT. Rob has worked on game-chang­ing inno­va­tions from Blue­tooth to what would even­tu­al­ly become Ama­zon Web Ser­vices, and we’re thrilled to share some of his insights on Sirqul, IoT, and the role of tech­nol­o­gy in our broad­er soci­ety in our next blog post!