Gimbal
Gimbal today quietly announced that they had spun themselves off from Qualcomm. Gimbal was part of Qualcomm’s foray into wireless retail and helps retailers communicate more easily with their audience within a close proximity, giving them relevant information and valuable offers. We actually met with Gimbal’s now CEO, Rocco Fabiano, back in September to talk about Gimbal and what it enables from both the retailer and the consumer perspective. The technology itself is very promising and will likely get slow uptake in the retail industry as many retailers look for new ways to communicate with their customers. Below, we’ve got a video for you to get an idea of how Gimbal works in our current mobile world.
Gimbal may fundamentally change the way that users interact with retailers and they might never know it because Gimbal’s job is to squarely enable the retailer (or any broadcasting party) to seamlessly communicate with their audience. Gimbal, Inc. as a spin-0ff of Qualcomm’s QTI (Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.) division (after the recent restructuring) already has quite a few major investors that believe in the Gimbal vision which include Qualcomm as one of the biggest investors. Some other investors in Gimbal, Inc. include AEG, SK Planet and Zebra Technologies Corporation. Each of these companies has a uniquely different interest in integrating Gimbal’s technologies into what they do, be it owning entertainment venues, promoting sales to consumers, or managing inventories. Ultimately, Gimbal is an interesting solution to a current problem that many businesses simply don’t know how to resolve easily or quickly and ultimately fail to accomplish anything by only creating apps. Gimbal will enable these businesses to more intelligently communicate with their customers and understand what they want and where they want it.
We contacted Qualcomm for comment about the Gimbal spin-off and to get some of the financial details of the transaction, but it appears as though those details have not been made public yet and that we probably won’t know exactly how much of Gimbal, Inc. Qualcomm still owns. We were told by Gimbal’s own PR agency that we would be kept up to date on those details when they become available. There’s still a lot of money to be made in business to consumer interaction and that business will always be fundamentally looking for new and better ways to sell things that consumers want when they want them. We will report back to you if and when we get any more details about Gimbal’s spin-off and if they gain any notable deployments either with their investors or with any new customers that they might make public. Ultimately, with this kind of business companies like Gimbal struggle with being able to talk about where their product is being used just because of how secretive some of these larger companies can be.
