We've all been there, seen it, and even done it ourselves. We're talking or texting on our phones while walking around the isles of our favorite store. Half the time people are in a venue they're more fixated on what's happening on their phone than what's around them. What about those brick and mortars around us? How can they get our attention when our noses are in our devices?

The way people use their devices may never change, but the way in which businesses interact with their mobile phone loving customers can. Cisco's Customer Mobile Experiences (CMX) solution provides businesses with the technology to leverage the mobile trend to their advantage by serving smartphone carrying visitors, guests, passengers, shoppers and students location-based services to get their attention.

Among these tools is a valuable set of API that can unlock location-based services, such as indoor navigation and push notifications to create a more personalized mobile experience.  

We recently worked with Topcoder.comto kick off a coding challenge usingthe CMX Mobile Server SDK to create a new Android or iOS app which would trigger a push-notification to join a scheduled WebEx meeting as soon as someone enters a specified conference location. The top two submissions were so impressive that they're both being reviewed for incorporation into future CMX offerings!

The Connected Mobile Experiences solution has proven to be an extremely valuable resource for developers and businesses worldwide. For example, the St. Olavs Hospital in Trondheim, Norway, wanted to transform the hospital experience into a supportive and engaging visit for their patients and the patients' guests. One of our ecosystem partners, MazeMap helped St. Olav's integrate an indoor navigation tool built using the Mobility Services API to guide users through the very large medical facility with turn-by-turn directions within the venue. Visitors no longer have to face the stress of finding a room or department. The location services delivered by Cisco and MazeMap also improves productivity and coordination among research, clinician and teaching staff by cutting down the time they would otherwise have lost trying to find the right conference rooms.

The St. Olavs success story is just one of many. To read the full case study, click here.

It's our goal to make these CMX developer resources open and available for anyone who'd like to try their hand at developing a Location-Based Service application. You can get started by downloading the Mobility Services API and refer back to the CMX Reference Manuals, for additional guidance in the process. Both are found on devNet, an online repository made available by Cisco. devNet offers partners API sets, SDKs, an interactive developer community, discussion forums, direct support, and remote access lab services called sandboxes. If not already a Cisco partner, a couple more steps, outlined within the Solution Partner Program, will need to be completed before accessing devNet.

We would love to hear from you and learn how you are using CMX to make your little slice of the world, a better place!