 Kia ora, everyone. Good to be back. I'll be talking to you about some of the findings that we came across with a discreet pilot project around iBeacons. And as a disclaimer before I really get into it, is many of those challenges that we encountered have already been a count of other people dealing with this technology as well. And some of the issues that we were struggling with have already been solved in the interim. But we started a year ago, and at that time, things weren't just quite as far as they are now. And so it's probably worthwhile noting that stuff's evolving so fast, and the landscape of it is changing so quickly that whatever you're putting into place needs to allow for rapid iteration as the technology matures and new standards emerge. So on that disclaimer, what are iBeacons? iBeacons are what it says, they're little small, low-powered transmitters helping smartphones determine their precise position, proximity, or context. So they look, there's various flavors of them, but they look a bit like this, small little things that you can stick to an object or a display case or whatever you else fancy. And then you have a phone that has an app that can read the signals that this thing emits. And as I get closer to it, my phone can do something. So it can buzz or bring up a piece of content, play back a piece of audio. And that's all it does really. It's really just telling the phone, hey, you're close to me, do something about it, sort of thing. So this pilot, as all good things, started with a hypothesis, which in this case was this. As a visitor, I want to be able to access in-depth information about the objects I'm looking at to quench my thirst for knowledge. That's a pretty generic statement, very aware of that. But what we wanted to do is try and figure out whether this technology, proximity, awareness combined with mobile devices could help deliver on this need. So what we did is we put 12 of these beacons up in one of our galleries, invisible to the public. So we just stuck them under the display cases or behind the objects. And then we had a customized version of the MyTours app to serve up content as you would get closer to the beacons. And then we just kind of went for it and tried it out and learned a few things. So what's the things that we've learned? So we've tested with a very small sample group, and we're not quite done with the pilot yet either. So we will go through a bit more user testing as we wrap this up. But in terms of the things that we have learned, I can already tell you now, herding or working with beacons is a bit like herding cats, vanishing cats, for that matter, because they do get lost. They all look the same on the outside, so it's really hard to tell once you have a pile of them lying around which object they belong to. And the adhesive isn't as strong as it says. So they fall off, and visitors are attracted to little technology looking like thingies, so they take them and they're gone. This by team moves them because they don't know what they are and they haven't been briefed on the pilot. They get bricked because the firmware upgrade through the app just didn't quite work that well. So we ended up with three lost beacons to date, and it might be more by now, who knows. But it's probably safe to say that there's a lot of things to consider in terms of placing these and installing these beacons that have a very, very direct impact on the performance of these things. So that does change, that poses challenges for the scalability of these systems. We're thinking about rolling these out across the entire building. Does that mean that more beacons equal more trouble? I don't know yet. With new fleet management apps and ways around to bulk configure these things, things might get easier. But it does take a lot of manual tweaking to get a well-calibrated system, especially if you do it yourself, and striking a balance between the response time, so how quickly will this thing be picked up by your phone, the signal bleed, conflicting beacons sending signals and they're getting picked up by your phone at the same time, and the granularity of the setup, so how many of these things can you actually shove into a display case while still having a good user experience? Not so many, is the answer. So it's really trying to work all those factors out to get a good system going. And you will need an app for it. So either you'll have your own app, or you'll find someone to partner with who has an app. But it comes with a whole raft of consequences that we're all trying to get around, that these apps entail. So it's just something to keep in mind. Of course, with a technology pilot, what you hope is that the technology works and just blends into the background and lets the content shine. So what we did is also look at different types of content and how well they work. And as we all know, in this room, there is a tendency museum wishful thinking to just give them all we got and attach it to the object and they will love it. But what we found is that flooding already overwhelmed visitors with dense museum content doesn't necessarily work that well. So if you give them a longish blog on the Giant Moa, chances are that they're just gonna read the heading and then they're gonna go and look for the next beacon to scan and that's it. So even with that small sample group that we tested, visitors didn't wanna consume lengthy text on their mobile devices. They wanted to rather have specifically produced content that works within the constraints of the platform. And surprisingly, video and images also didn't work as well. Audio, however, did. And that brought me to my most important insight. I think that there's horses for courses in a way and we need to think about, as museums, we need to think about what sort of visitor behavior we actually wanna encourage. Which is the same challenge with any mobile content on site so it's not limited to beacon technology. But we don't wanna get into the way of the museum experience that visitors come to us for in the first place. So there's an inherent risk to zap visitors out of their immersive experience and pushing them into sort of a digital tunnel that takes them away from the real. And that's just something that we need to be aware of. And that means acknowledging that there's multiple stages to a visitor journey that might be more suitable to serve up richer content. So maybe while they're in the galleries, they don't wanna read the lengthy text, but after their visit, when they're kind of winding down in the museum cafe, they might. And that's just something to keep in mind. So if we go back to that initial hypothesis, I've practiced this word a lot. Hypothesis, hypothesis, hypothesis. I would like to change this to something more along the lines of this hypothesis. As a visitor, I want to be able to bookmark the objects I'm looking at to access in-depth information and quench my thirst for knowledge when it suits me, which I think is a very important differentiation and food for thought. Thank you very much and talk to you later.