You might have noticed that we’ve changed our branding. The first thing to say is that we are definitely still providing WiFi solutions. Purple WiFi is still a core product of ours. It’s just that driven by our customers needs, we’ve started to think of what we can provide above and beyond WiFi.
With the arrival of the ‘Internet of Things’, we now have intelligent devices that can can give us information, communicate with one another and also act as sensors for things such as heat, humidity and lighting, to name but a few. We can begin to think of venues as much more than just WiFi hotspots; we can think of them as connected spaces … or as we are now calling them, ‘intelligent spaces’.
I remember almost 3 years ago when Gavin (our CEO) and I were preparing one of our first presentations we were going to give at a conference in Singapore. Within that presentation we coined the phrase ‘Google Analytics for the bricks and mortar world’. And for a long time, that was kind of our unofficial ‘vision’.
While that’s still something we are definitely working towards and getting closer to each day, we’ve arrived at a point where we can be more than just ‘Google Analytics for the bricks and mortar world’. With these new intelligent connected spaces we can become the physical web for the bricks and mortar world – or as Gavin put it in a recent blog – the ‘World Wide World’.
So we’ve made the decision to take the product in a direction that’s not completely WiFi dependant and is agnostic when it comes to where it finds its data and the story it tells. Ironically, in order to grow our business in this way, we’ve had to shrink our logo. And our new URL is www.purple.ai.
We’ve also expanded our product range:
1) First is the Purple WiFi that we all know and love. Nothing’s changed here
2) Secondly, we decided to break Location out into a standalone product. We’re putting a lot of work into this feature and with the addition of new tools such as WayFinding, this area of our portal can really stand on its own two feet. Also, our Location product is no longer dependent on WiFi data alone. All of Purple’s location services to date have used WiFi as the source of X,Y coordinates. Moving forward, X,Y data sources will change. For example, some Purple customer deployments are now using GPS as a location source, plus we are exploring BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) as an indoor positioning application, and in the future more sources such as intelligent lighting will be added as the market matures.
3) Next up is the first brand new feature for Purple, that moves us into the world of IoT or IoE. It’s called Fusion. The main feature of Fusion is connectors. Plug and play connectors allow you to bring all your data sources together into one place. Add to everything we collect over WiFi, your own layer of enterprise data from CRM, Loyalty, POS and other sources with Open Data and Sensors, and the result is a truly eye opening solution. By simply dragging and dropping any data source into our dashboard, business teams can distinguish how one source affects another. So, you can see if this week’s increase in web traffic impacts footfall, or last week’s weather affects your end of month sales in store. If you can measure it, Purple can analyze it.
4) Last but not least is BYOD, or Purple Provision. Purple Provision allows us to move into the corporate office space by facilitating the secure and encrypted authentication of staff and visitor devices. This will be achieved by installing a profile onto that particular device that can be managed and revoked quickly, and securely if needed. More to come on this as we near the launch date for BYOD.
So, there’s the explanation of the switch to Purple. We’ve definitely not abandoned our WiFi heritage; we’re just turning the world Purple in more ways.
Useful Links
For the official brand change Press Release.
For our new product video.