I was thrilled to join the AnyPresence Chicago team at this week’s RAMP “Advance Commerce & Mobile Retail Services Summit” welcoming 800+ retail and brand executives for two and a half days of mobile innovation.
We kicked off the week with a tour of one of Walgreens’ twelve “Stores of the Future” on a field trip to State Street in downtown Chicago. Located in a historic building, this modern convenience store is an example of the innovative, high-touch, one-stop shopping experience, including many mobile conveniences. Beyond prescriptions and flu shots, these stores feature elements such as fresh prepared foods, well experiences with accessible pharmacists and in-store clinics, to a look boutique with prestige and niche cosmetics, eyebrow bars for facial grooming, barista-prepared coffee, juice and smoothie bars, and my personal favorite, self-serve frozen yogurt.
There are mobile innovations around every corner, from facial scanners in the beauty aisle that mobile-enable you to “try on” new products, mobile kiosks to fill your prescriptions, self-service photos and printing at a mobile center, and a Virtual Bartender for cocktail recipes. Not to mention the large screens prominently featured everywhere you look, enabling a more personalized in store experience.
Beyond Walgreens’ Store of the Future, the AnyPresence team is excited to meet with executives from the world’s largest brands across the week to learn about their mobile roadmap. Thus far, we’ve spoken with mobile executives about how AnyPresence can support the “Internet of Things”, mobile (and web apps, too!), whether to accelerate their own developers or to help create new revenue streams in mobile. There’s been lots of discussion on the complex requirements of retail apps, user authentication, user roles, security, POS integration, e-commerce and social extensions, connectivity to multiple data sources, customer analytics, and of course rapid prototyping and generation for multiple platforms from iOS to Android and HTML5… all great use cases for AnyPresence’s mobile backend-as-a-service!
