Have you ever been slaving away at work all day, yet somebody asks, "Where have you been, I have been looking for you all day and by the way, have you seen James?" Well, CMX (Connected Mobile Experience) along with a cool mobile app can tackle those questions and more.

To start, Cisco Connected Mobile Experiences is a solution that lets organizations leverage their existing Wi-Fi infrastructure for business analytics, and transform the way they connect with their mobile end-users.  With CMX, we provide the engine for developers to build apps with the Mobility Services APIs that can show where I have been on the floor and a user locator to find out where James has been.

So, what can you do with the CMX Mobility Services APIs?

In the DevNet Zone of Cisco Live 2015 in Milan, we decided to showcase four distinct applications using the CMX API:

1. Realtime Heatmap of various zones inside the DevNet Zone
2. Realtime staff tracking
3. Places visited and suggested points of interest
4. iBeacon -Messages of Things

User Experience was a principle consideration, hence we had a professional designer devise the floor map as well the markings for the information to be displayed. Once this was done, mapping into the API was simple task.

1. Real-time Time Heatmaps

The idea here was to showcase a real-time map of the DevNet Zone floor. With this visualization, you can see which DevNet booths had a lot of foot traffic, compared to those that were lightly visited.

A few other applications of this real-time visualization:

• Finding free conference rooms
• Finding less crowded exits in a building during an emergency
• Finding approximate number of people on the floor
• Analytics of device types

1. Real-Time Staff Tracking

The purpose of this application is to locate staff members on the DevNet zone. For this application, staff members granting permission to be located will register themselves using a simple web URL. This maps the user to the Mac address of the phone. One can also register other devices such as a home laptop, simple gadgets, or anything with Wi-Fi and Mac address. In the future, we plan to integrate the Jabber Guest API to connect to particular staff in real-time.

A few other applications of this innovation:

• Locating doctors in hospitals
• Finding support staff for any event
• Asset Management in Healthcare and other industries

1. Places Visited and Suggested Points of Interest

The purpose of this application is to show a user his route map for the day or any time duration. This route map can show the user's movements during the day of the event and how much time they spent at each booth. Each of the booths are mapped on the Event map. This application will show the user which locations have been completed thus far and remaining points of interests to visit. Many of the users were awed to see where they have been during the day. The screen application also has a QR code for users to scan with their personal devices to see their map.

Other use cases with this application are:

• Manufacturing Floor -Continuous Improvement Program where spaghetti diagrams can be drawn automatically to show various flaws in the process
• Education -Students need to learn about a concept for at least 4 hours before they can move to the next chapter or test.
• Theme parks

1. iBeacons for Messages of Things

Messages of Things (MoT) showcases the use of messaging notifications when users reach a micro-location. Once users are at a particular location they receive a generic or personalized message from the event organizers. For example, "Welcome to the Learning Labs" or "Dave, check out the new CMX apps." We also organized a Treasure hunting game using iBeacons. So where is CMX? We added a beacon as a Point of Interest on the Floor map. This allowed the visitors to visualize the location of each of the beacons in real time.

DevNet is Cisco's developer program. Traditionally Cisco has been a network company, but DevNet is a platform that enables developers to try, experience and develop innovative applications using Cisco technology. Most Cisco products have begun supporting APIs to write new applications or program the network.

Click on the links to earn more about Cisco CMX Mobility Services APIs,  CMX, and Cisco DevNet.

Tweet us @Cisco_Mobility if you have any questions.