Curbside, a Silicon Valley startup that connects stores and restaurants with mobile customers, recently announced a public SDK for ARRIVE, Curbside’s predictive arrival technology, which accurately determines when someone is approaching a physical store - all without draining the customer’s smartphone battery.
This tool is available to developers to incorporate into any iOS or Android app - no check-ins required - and will give them a chance to explore applications for the technology across retail, food, hospitality, travel and many other domains.
We recently spoke with Jaron Waldman, CEO and Co-Founder of Curbside, to chat about ARRIVE, how it works and potential use cases.
ADM: I understand Curbside recently launched a public SDK. Can you tell me more about it?
Waldman: ARRIVE is a tool for seamlessly bridging digital and physical worlds. It’s the first thing we built when we started the company. The ARRIVE SDK predictively alerts when users are approaching a physical location with accuracy that vastly improves on geofences, and without draining your users' battery.
The SDK drops into any app and arrival alerts can be consumed on any system. ARRIVE includes a real-time dashboard for visualizing customer location as well as analytics. ARRIVE currently runs on tens of millions of smartphones in apps from leading restaurant chains and retailers like CVS, Sephora and Nordstrom. It helps them know definitively when their customers are approaching for curbside walkout, timing food prep or delivering great customer service in the store.
What’s new is that for the first time developers can sign up and
integrate the SDK end-to-end. We also have a great new analytics dashboard available.
ADM: What do you envision being the primary use cases for it?
Waldman: We think there are endless possibilities of how to use ARRIVE to create a seamless customer experience. We’re just really excited to see how developers will put this to use.
ADM: Why did you decide to open up Curbside to developers?
Waldman: We’re really curious about all the other uses that could be out there. We think this is a foundational technology - once you can reliably know when a customer is approaching it can change the way all kinds of services are delivered in the real world.
ADM: Who do you think will be most interested in this?
Waldman: I think anyone who is managing appointments or trying to deliver great experiences to their customers. The possibilities are endless.
Jaron Waldman, CEO and Co-Founder
of Curbside
ADM: How is ARRIVE being used already?
Waldman: Our existing use cases lean heavily toward enabling a great Curbside pickup (surprise!), to good in-store service like having the dressing room ready as shoppers approach. In food service it’s used to time food preparation to when a customer is a certain number of minutes away from the store so it’s fresh and hot, delivered right when they arrive
ADM: How does ARRIVE compare to beacons or geofences?
Beacons don’t work for these use cases, because in the real world 40 percent of people turn Bluetooth off, which means they just aren’t reliable enough. Several of us at Curbside worked on
Geofencing in iOS and although it’s great, it’s also not reliable enough for most of our customers’ needs. The other issue with Geofences is that they are distance based rather than time based. With geofences you set a radius around a location, but based on where the location is, as well as factors like local traffic conditions, the amount of time that it takes a customer to get from the perimeter of the fence to the store can vary dramatically. ARRIVE handles all that complexity for you.
ADM: Tell me about the REST API features…
Waldman: We have a REST API for interacting with the service. There are also web hooks, so arrival events can be consumed to any system developers want.
ADM: What kind of data and analytics are you offering to developers?
Waldman: We have a dashboard that provides complete real-time visibility and
analytics at the trip and site level. This includes valuable statistics like how many trips are happening, distance traveled, times of day, customer wait times before orders are handed off - really great, rich data that over the last couple of years we've learned that our customers need.
ADM: What do developers need to do to get started?
Waldman: Go to
https://curbside.com/developers to sign up for a free account. We worked hard to make our documentation really clear too and it includes quick start guides for iOS and Android.
About Jaron Waldman
Jaron Waldman is a lifelong entrepreneur and builder of things. He previously founded Placebase, a Los Angeles location technology company that was acquired by Apple in 2009. After the acquisition Jaron spent four years at Apple leading a team that developed location-based services across the Apple ecosystem. He became fascinated with the potential of location technology in the nascent era of mobile commerce, prompting him to leave Apple in 2013 and co-found Curbside.