GalacticWidgets: December 2014

I'm excited to announce that Diviner has some great new features. Here's the TLDR version:

Quick and easy coupons
Loyalty and Rewards
Wifi Connector
Webhooks

Now that that's out of the way, let's take a look at each feature, starting with Coupons. Diviner has always had the ability to define a Barcode URL to integrate special offers making it a flexible and powerful solution, but for small business owners who don't have fancy POS systems much less IT folk to integrate them, an even-simpler solution was needed. Well, Diviner now has a "Coupon" offer type. You still have complete control over the creative like you always have, but now Diviner creates a QR Code view for you. You simply enter a "Coupon Description" to describe this special offer, then when the coupon is redeemed, the Coupon Description displays again, letting you (or your employee or a volunteer or family member or whoever it is who's accepting the coupon) know what the coupon was for. Diviner tracks all the relevant redemption stats for you, so you can easily measure the success of any special offer at any time.

"Hey, back up a sec.... if it's a QR Code, how do I read it? Do I have to buy some new-fangled gadget?" Good questions. In both iOS and Android Diviner apps there is now an Offer Scanning Mode. When engaged, this allows you to scan customer QR Codes right from the device you already own. There's no special hardware to buy or additional software to install. I think this is really exciting because it supports what I've come to call "Just-in-time Couponing" (inspired by Just-in-time Compilation). You can easily create and distribute special offers based on the realtime needs of your business. Say you operate a fruit stand and the 300 pounds of mangos, which you were certain would sell like hotcakes, is now getting a bit "over-ripe." Fire-up a Diviner coupon to incentivize your in-bound customers to move those mangos!

Loyalty and Rewards programs work in a similar fashion. You can now create an offer that represents a customer action and based on the frequency of that action, your customers can accrue fixed rewards or loyalty points. You can then choose how and where these rewards are redeemed. Free tacos with the purchase of 2 drinks? No problem. 27 points to get a free tennis lesson? Super easy. Again, just like with Diviner Coupons, all transactions are done through the Offer Scanning Mode, so there's no hardware or software to buy, and all performance metrics are reported in realtime, so you can always see how your programs are performing.

Moving on, how do you, as a small business owner, offer your customers complimentary wifi without also letting the kid in the apartment upstairs bittorrent the latest Jennifer Lawrence archery movie? Diviner's Wifi Connector eases the pain. You can keep your network protected and even hidden. Customers who trigger a Wifi Connector offer according to the proximity and linger time rules you set can then choose to join your wifi network without ever seeing a password.

Lastly, we've introduced the "Webhook" offer (read more about the concept of webhooks here). I'm probably most excited about this feature. The vision of Diviner has always been to foster a rich ecosystem of surrounding extensions... custom middleware.... add-ons.... whatever you want to call it, we've always wanted people to extend what we're doing. Webhooks are another step in that direction. Rather than acting like a traditional offer within Diviner, webhooks do NOT issue a device notification, they do NOT display any alert text, and they do NOT have any creative. Instead, webhooks let you define url's that get called on "entry" and "exit" of an offer. In other words, in the same way that an offer can appear or disappear in the app's inbox can now invisibly trigger external systems of your choosing. You can also define whether the url should be triggered only once (on entry and exit but not on re-entry...) or if it should happen every time the user enters and exits. As always, as long as the user has not opted-out, we append the mobile device id that uniquely identifies the device to all outbound requests. This opens up the doors to all sorts of automated proximity-based possibilities.... hook it to a home automation system to turn on the lights as you enter a room then turn them off as you exit. Attach it to your favorite events platform to automatically check in users... whatever you want!

Anyway, that's a lot of text... here are some images of Diviner in action: