Podcasts about incontext solutions

The CPG Guys, Sri & PVSB, are joined in this episode by: Melissa Jurgens, Chief Operating Officer & Lucas Blair, Chief Technical Officer at InContext Solutions, the global leader in 3D simulation software for retail that helps brands & retailers reduce the time, cost, and risk of developing innovative in-store experiences.This episode is sponsored by InContext Solutions. Follow InContext online at: http://incontextsolutions.com Follow InContext on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/company/in-context-solutions/Follow Melissa on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissa-jurgens/Follow Lucas on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucasjblair/ Melissa & Lucas answer these questions:1) Melissa - your career spans quite a bit of experience in market research and competitive analysis at Mintel where you spent 10 years. Then you joined InContext Solutions as an account executive to grow to being the Chief operating officer. Take us through your career journey from Mintel to InContext Solutions. What prompted you to come here to InContext Solutions? Why retail tech leadership?2)  I'd love to go through a brief history of InContext. Where did the company start, what prompted interest in this space? What's the evolution over time?3) Tell us about InContext's virtual commerce offering. What makes InContext uniquely positioned to be the leading provider of virtual commerce solutions?4) So, let's talk about the metaverse.  How do you define the metaverse, and are you a metaverse company?5) There's a lot of hype around the metaverse, some say it won't last.  Let's talk about what some are the naysayers saying and break that down a bit.6) You talk about InContext being a building block to the metaverse.  Virtual commerce is one way.  What other building blocks should we be thinking about?7) Historically, InContext's bread and butter has been in shopper insights and visualizing retail stores. How does this tie into what you're doing with virtual commerce?CPG Guys Website: http://CPGGuys.comDISCLAIMER: The content in this podcast episode is provided for general informational purposes only. By listening to our episode, you understand that no information contained in this episode should be construed as advice from CPGGUYS, LLC or the individual author, hosts, or guests, nor is it intended to be a substitute for research on any subject matter. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation by CPGGUYS, LLC. The views expressed by guests are their own and their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent. The views expressed by the CPGGUYS, LLC do not represent the views of their employers or the entity they represent. CPGGUYS LLC expressly disclaims any and all liability or responsibility for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, consequential or other damages arising out of any individual's use of, reference to, or inability to use this podcast or the information we presented in this podcast.

We’re delighted to have Tony Bevilacqua joining us today! Tony is the CEO and Founder of Cognitive3D, which is based in Vancouver, Canada. About the previous company that Tony founded Cognitive3D is the second company that Tony has founded. His previous company was focused on revenue optimization, and it had a very heavy analytics back-end, so they made a lot of decisions which were based on collected data, and the company helped its clients build a better revenue optimization. With his first company, Tony spent a lot of time working in the game space, and he had some early exposure to the Oculus DK1 and DK2. (The Oculus DK1 and DK2 were the very early development kits that Palmer Luckey created for the Oculus, which is a head-mounted display for virtual reality.) Founding Cognitive3D After selling his first company, Tony wanted to spin off and do something in the virtual, augmented, and mixed-reality space, so he ended up founding Cognitive3D late in 2015. From there, he started to construct a new way to visualize spatial outlooks. The different definitions of virtual reality, and what they mean Virtual Reality (VR) is when a user is wearing a head-mounted display that fully encompasses their field of view, and everything they see is computer-generated within the headset. Augmented Reality (AR) is a pass-through experience where the user’s world is augmented. However, AR does not necessarily influence or overtake the user’s field of view. Mixed Reality (MR) is when the user’s field of view is augmented with additional 3D items, objects, and experiences. A headset can also be a great vehicle for data collection Tony points out that if one thinks of the headset as a vehicle for data collection, it can provide a lot of great opportunities to understand both human behavior and human performance. How Tony went about developing the new, cutting-edge technology When Tony first encountered the capabilities of the new 3D technology, he saw it as a whole new opportunity to collect insights on how people interact. He understood games and entertainment well, and he was very excited about the potential that virtual reality held. He knew that by using it, he could build a product that could help game developers create even better content, so Cognitive3D started building out a platform for collecting spatial insights. Taking his new product to the market When Tony took his company's new product to market in 2016, he saw that plenty of game developers and entertainment companies were using it. And it was also being used for enterprise, with the two pre-dominant use cases being in consumer research, and training and simulation. By the beginning of 2017, Tony had fully pivoted his company towards enterprise uses, focusing on consumer research, and training and simulation. A study done with Kellogg’s A while ago, Kellogg’s introduced a new product to the market. They wanted to understand the different placements of the product on the shelf and how they could potentially influence users to notice it. So, Cognitive3D, working alongside with Accenture, Qualcomm, and InContext Solutions, built out a use case and scenario for them in the form of a two-cell study. The first cell was their traditional placements, and the second cell was in an alternate location that was suggested by the Cognitive 3D team, with the additional use of some signage. In the study, they discovered that although users purchased more products from an eye-level location, they still managed to create enough sales and visibility for the new product, without cannibalizing the rest of the brand category, when they placed the new product at a lower location. Tony explains that by placing the new product at a lower location, it left the premium display row open to generate sales in the way that it would normally do, and they also had the opportunity to introduce a new product.

The power of XR will never be able to destroy the good ol‘ desire to go out and shop, but that doesn’t mean that XR couldn’t be used to improve the shopping experience. Tracey Wiedmeyer and Alan discuss a few ideas, from browsing the catch of the day in a VR tropical wonderland, to using VR and AR to test out retail layouts before you build them. Alan: Today’s guest is Tracey Wiedmeyer. Tracey is the chief technology officer and co-founder of InContext Solutions. They’re delivering a mixed reality platform that is the world’s largest brands and retailers are using to streamline their merchandising process and go to market strategy much faster. Tracey is also the former president of the VR/AR Association chapter in Chicago, Milwaukee and a board member for the Information Research Technology Institute at Sam Walton College of Business. Tracey is also a member of the Forbes Technology Council. You can learn more about InContext Solutions at www.incontextsolutions.com. With that, I’d love to welcome to the show: Tracey Wiedmeyer. Tracey: Hey Alan, glad to be here. Alan: My pleasure. I’m so excited. This is a show I’ve been really waiting to do because you guys have been using virtual and augmented reality, mixed reality to help retailers preplan their stores, because right now a retailer, if they want to design a new store, they literally have to build a physical store, put all the shelves and build a mock store. And you’re doing this through virtual/augmented reality, and the metrics that you’re able to collect, keep maps, and where people are looking and the amount of data that you’re able to collect from users in a digital world versus a physical world is actually really quite amazing. So maybe you can just talk about InContext Solutions and what you’re doing for retailers. Tracey: Sure, yeah. There was a lot to bite off there. I’ll break it down little by little as we go here. So I think you mentioned creating brand new physical stores. There’s actually more retail stores today, more brick-and-mortar stores than there were back in 2000 when the retail apocalypse version 1 hit the street. You know, it was the end of brick-and-mortar, everyone has gone digital. So I think there’s a lot of stores being added today and most stores – but whether you’re a centre store grocery retailer or fashion or apartment store – those stores go through a regular reset on a period of time, whether that’s every couple of years or longer than that. I think the nuance there is actually at the brand level, you know, especially if we focus on centre store grocery for a little bit here. The brands are actually working with their retail partners multiple times a year to reset the categories that you shop. So cereal, frozen foods, healthcare, baby foods, all that sort of stuff are constantly going through some sort of revision period, whether it’s… the old way’s every six months, because that’s how long it takes them, and I’ll get into that in a little bit. But they’re trying to get you to buy or notice one or two more products on that journey to the shelf. We’re using virtual technology now to basically facilitate that process; everything from a brand new store, to which products go on the shelf, and how many of them are stacked right to left and front to back. There’s a lot of low hanging fruit in that process, and maybe I don’t know how much, Alan, you know about what that process looks like today, or in the past. What I’m going to do is tell you a little bit about where we’ve come from. A lot of brands

The power of XR will never be able to destroy the good ol‘ desire to go out and shop, but that doesn’t mean that XR couldn’t be used to improve the shopping experience. Tracey Wiedmeyer and Alan discuss a few ideas, from browsing the catch of the day in a VR tropical wonderland, to using VR and AR to test out retail layouts before you build them. Alan: Today’s guest is Tracey Wiedmeyer. Tracey is the chief technology officer and co-founder of InContext Solutions. They’re delivering a mixed reality platform that is the world’s largest brands and retailers are using to streamline their merchandising process and go to market strategy much faster. Tracey is also the former president of the VR/AR Association chapter in Chicago, Milwaukee and a board member for the Information Research Technology Institute at Sam Walton College of Business. Tracey is also a member of the Forbes Technology Council. You can learn more about InContext Solutions at www.incontextsolutions.com. With that, I’d love to welcome to the show: Tracey Wiedmeyer. Tracey: Hey Alan, glad to be here. Alan: My pleasure. I’m so excited. This is a show I’ve been really waiting to do because you guys have been using virtual and augmented reality, mixed reality to help retailers preplan their stores, because right now a retailer, if they want to design a new store, they literally have to build a physical store, put all the shelves and build a mock store. And you’re doing this through virtual/augmented reality, and the metrics that you’re able to collect, keep maps, and where people are looking and the amount of data that you’re able to collect from users in a digital world versus a physical world is actually really quite amazing. So maybe you can just talk about InContext Solutions and what you’re doing for retailers. Tracey: Sure, yeah. There was a lot to bite off there. I’ll break it down little by little as we go here. So I think you mentioned creating brand new physical stores. There’s actually more retail stores today, more brick-and-mortar stores than there were back in 2000 when the retail apocalypse version 1 hit the street. You know, it was the end of brick-and-mortar, everyone has gone digital. So I think there’s a lot of stores being added today and most stores – but whether you’re a centre store grocery retailer or fashion or apartment store – those stores go through a regular reset on a period of time, whether that’s every couple of years or longer than that. I think the nuance there is actually at the brand level, you know, especially if we focus on centre store grocery for a little bit here. The brands are actually working with their retail partners multiple times a year to reset the categories that you shop. So cereal, frozen foods, healthcare, baby foods, all that sort of stuff are constantly going through some sort of revision period, whether it’s… the old way’s every six months, because that’s how long it takes them, and I’ll get into that in a little bit. But they’re trying to get you to buy or notice one or two more products on that journey to the shelf. We’re using virtual technology now to basically facilitate that process; everything from a brand new store, to which products go on the shelf, and how many of them are stacked right to left and front to back. There’s a lot of low hanging fruit in that process, and maybe I don’t know how much, Alan, you know about what that process looks like today, or in the past. What I’m going to do is tell you a little bit about where we’ve come from. A lot of brands

Heather Baker, VP of talent at InContext Solutions, and Joe Wegreke, Director of human capital consulting at TriNet, join Scott in-studio at WGN Radio in downtown Chicago to discuss mixed reality and human resource services.

ShipBob is a technology company that streamlines shipping and order fulfillment for e-commerce businesses. Dhruv co-founded ShipBob in May 2014 with Divey Gulati, out of YCombinator. Prior to ShipBob, he spent two years as a software developer at InContext Solutions, another Chicago startup. And previously he spent a few years as a research assistant at Purdue University.Discover more details here.Some of the highlights from the episode:How is ShipBob unique? What is special about the product?Hot manage threats and disruptions in the marketShipBob’s International Expansion StrategyLessons learned growing from 100+ employees to 450+ employeesEvery single thing the employees do must be optimizedTrust that the team around you is as wise as you.Follow us on:Instagram: http://bit.ly/2Wba8v7Twitter: http://bit.ly/2WeulzXLinkedin: http://bit.ly/2w9YSQXFacebook: http://bit.ly/2HtryLd

We’re joined on the show by Tracey Wiedmeyer, CTO of InContext Solutions, a global leader in scalable cloud-based virtual reality solutions for retail, dedicated to optimizing the in-store shopper experience. Tracey talks about how brands and retailers are using VR to test new merchandising layouts, product packaging and shopper engagement. He also talks more about their new VR collaboration tools that allow brands and retailers to work together in real-time within a VR experience to test new learnings and ultimately save valuable time to market with new concepts. Full shownotes available at: http://thevrara.com/podcast-posts/traceywiedmeyer

Tracey Wiedmeyer is the CTO and a Co-Founder of InContext Solutions, the leader in scalable virtual reality (VR) shopping and retail solutions. InContext Solutions lets manufacturers and retailers simulate real in-store shopping situations to ideate, evaluate and activate all types of merchandising, display, layout and other in-store shopping experiences within a VR store environment before implementing them in the real world. Just last month, they closed their Series E round of funding, bringing their total funding to $42.5M.  In This Episode You Will Learn: Why Tracey and his co-founders started InContext Solutions How he raised their seed capital from his family over Christmas How similarly do people behave in virtual reality vs the real world How InContext Solutions recreates stores How they landed their first customers How they try to lure tech talent away from quant trading What he’d like to see big companies improve on Why you have to focus on ROI and business cases when selling to large enterprises Whether we are in a simulation or not Where the future of virtual reality is heading in 5-10 years What the future of retail may look like How they landed a partnership with Intel How a partnership with a big company can benefit a startup Favorite Books: The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't by Jim Collins Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles That Fuel Success and Performance at Work by Shawn Achor The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil Best Sources to Learn More About Virtual Reality: Unreal VR NextVR Samsung VR Microsoft HoloLens Google VR