Vancouver’s Unravel Brings Businesses and Customers Together Through Apple’s iBeacon

Vancouver-based Unravel recognizes that in our content-heavy world, consumers are often bombarded with irrelevant content—content that has imminent expiration or is calling to an improbable action. These types of engagement are fruitless for the brands and businesses and are annoying for everyone.

The old paradigm is that it was up to the brand to attract and nurture the consumers by reaching as far and wide as possible, but Unravel is enabling the consumers to meet the content and data halfway.

By using iBeacon technology developed by Estimote, Unravel is creating a new avenue for companies to communicate with the public. People with the Unravel app on their smartphone can one day walk up to a restaurant and instantly see the menu or approach a movie poster and get the nearest theatre location and show time.

Unravel offers three different models of content upon their dashboard: Webpage link that will show up as a browser, image that will tell a story through mobile swipe and a simple message such as “Welcome!”

“A great thing about this is that when you leave a location, you don’t leave all that content behind,” says Amit Aujla, cofounder of Unravel. “All the content gets compiled into the [Unravel] feed, so if there was something that you were interested in that popped up on your phone, you can come back to it later.”

Once the individual “Beacons” are implemented in a given service location, it will be capable of functioning in three different zones: Immediate (one meter), intermediate (five meters) and very far (25 meters).

“The main one that will be used by businesses will be the Immediate Zone,” Daniel Khatkar, cofounder of Unravel, told Techvibes, “because when you start going into the larger range, the radius gets really big. If you are on the other side [of a business] you might not necessarily want to receive information there.”   

Unravel is not only using the iBeacon to send messages and entice customers, there is a lot of big data that can come from such a little device. The iBeacon can measure temperature and evaluate the number of occupancies in one area for a length of time. All this data can be instrumental for companies such as transportation, retail and event hosting that are seeking optimal costumer services and internal performance.  

Currently Unravel is preparing to host a series of scavenger hunts in collaboration with established businesses. Participants will get to experience the new technology first hand and have a chance to win gift cards and event tickets. The app will be available shortly on the App Store and the scavenger hunt is set to commence in August.  

“With the scavenger hunt, we want to show people how the technology works,” said Khatkar. “It’s an opt-in technology, if they don’t want to use it, at least they will know the purpose of the technology and what it is.”

Unravel offers brands and advertisers a broad platform to inform, promote and keep in touch with consumers. The scavenger hunt is the initial step for Unravel to gain traction, but the potential seems promising for this young company as they continue to educate the newfound value of iBeacon.

“I want businesses to contact other businesses and say, ‘I want to advertise on your Beacon in your store,’” said Khatkar. “Or if I’m an advertiser and I want to contact Uber or a cab company and put a Beacon in there—based on the demographic—then I’ll have a target audience.”