NEW YORK – Beacons are an increasingly common solution to the challenge of locating specific mobile devices within buildings. A small, low-cost piece of hardware, beacons use Bluetooth connections to transmit messages or prompts directly to a smartphone or tablet.
Most importantly, according to an article in Business Insider, they are poised to transform how retailers, event organizers, transit systems, enterprises and educational institutions communicate with people indoors.
Business Insider’s research arm, BI Intelligence, has published a new report explaining what beacons are, how they work, and how Apple — with its iBeacon implementation — is championing this new paradigm for indoor mobile communication.
Some findings of the report include:
- In-store retail and offline payments are in the first wave of beacon applications. Retail outlets are adopting beacons to provide customers with product information, flash sales or deals, and to speed up the checkout process with a completely contactless payments system.
- A barrier to wide adoption of beacon technology is that they often require several layers of permissions. Customers have to turn on Bluetooth, accept location services on the relevant app and opt-in to receive in-store or indoor notifications.
- The beacon wars are heating up. PayPal and Qualcomm are gearing up to challenge Apple with beacon hardware of their own. Smaller vendors like Estimote, Swirl and GPShopper are entering the mix with beacon management and consulting on top of hardware or software platforms.
For more on beacon technology, keep an eye out for an article on beacons in the upcoming October issue of NACS Magazine.