What is a beacon technology or what is a beacon device?
As it sounds that beacon is a wireless transmitter to transform data from one place to other but this is completely wrong, it is not a data transmitter. Beacon is just an identifier that tells the systems to identify a particular location wirelessly. A system like Smartphone devices can scan nearby beacons and know the information coded on their unique values.
Beacon classified into two types of beacons that are ibeacon from Apple & Eddystone from Google. It’s a revolutionary technology to implement in many industries in today’s world and innovation keeps going on different use cases of using beacons in the business, operations, etc.
Peter Lewis, Google explains what is a beacon technology and Google cloud platform for beacons.
Beacons are giving new trials for ibeacon mobile app developers and businesses. These little gadgets have been talked about so much that the year 2014 is being praised as the “Year of beacons”. Though it was first introduced to the retail industry in 2014. Then become available and implemented in other business industries to optimize & automate the operations of different kinds of businesses.
Nowadays it has been widely used in Retail, Manufacturing Industry, Research Centers, Customer Behaviour Analytics, Tracking, Security and much more.
Why beacon is a BLE device? What is a BLE device?
BLE means Bluetooth low energy. If you remember before a few years back, when we were switched on Bluetooth in smartphones it always drains the device battery. But it is not with the new generation of Bluetooth it is power efficient and consumes very less energy the same as other hardware in the smart devices. BLE was introduced in the year of 2010 to overcome the heavy consumption of resources by the transitional Bluetooth chip. To run efficiently it is a hardcore requirement of every beacon device to perform a long duration without changing to charging the batteries. New generation Bluetooth makes that happen, now button like beacon devices runs for months or years on single button cells. Beacon uses Bluetooth to broadcast signals that’s why it sometimes termed as a BLE device also.
Google provides a dedicated cloud platform for beacon app developers to manage & integrate beacon SDK into smartphones or web codes. iBeacon / Eddystone Developers use this platform to create fantastic proximity-based experiences for different kinds of businesses.
Different types of beacon devices! Credit beacon app development company
Top 10 exciting use cases of ibeacon devices in business – 2020
- Shopping Malls – Shopping malls can gain tremendous benefits from the beacon technology. They can provide a route map of the mall, walkthru feature to different shops, in-mall location-based offers, discount deals, check-ins in event time, broadcast useful information, engage customers and many other things.One of the innovative ideas is – A shopping mall in Denmark gained the best way to keep kids occupied and engaged while their parents shopped. They used an app “GeoTrail GO” to set up an indoor treasure hunt with indoor maps and holiday-themed games. This treasure hunt kept kids engaged in finding virtual treasures and earning points.
This beacon treasure hunt not only gave parents a bit more time and space to shop but also allowed business owners to experience a boost in revenue. - Hotels, Restaurant, Rooms – Due to the high possibility of personalization and intelligent nature, ibeacons are effective for the hospitality industry. They can greet their regular customers as soon as they enter into the property or facility. They can provide a guide through the different property areas. Customers places order in-house & beacons can track the exact location of the customer. Google map doesn’t work indoors but ibeacons or Eddystone can work in-house within the property.
Hotels, Motels, Guesthouse can use ibeacon to enable access keys to open the rooms of the customers. They can track whereabouts of the customer in the property to get customer behavior data and that information they can use to further enhance their services. - Payment Industry – As you are already aware that how one person can pay the amount to the merchant through scanning a QR code, tap card on card terminal machine, etc. There is one disadvantage in these methods that they can only work within a very short distance. Whereas, iBeacon or Eddystone beacon technology further innovate this method by providing a way of payment through a distance of 5 – 10 meters or more. It is very useful in a period of crisis like corona or COVID-19, where everyone tries to make contactless payments from the distance. Beacons enable the customer to pay for orders in-store without standing in a long queue.
Get in touch with ibeacon based payment wallet app development company if you want to have the same system for your business establishment. - Training institutes, Colleges, universities – Traditionally, each educational institute has a notice board culture in their operations, either the board placed on the reception, entry point or classes. it is a complete waste of paper & time resources. Most of the time students ignore checking the boards on regular bases. Then, the Teacher or Professor needs to communicate the information which is bare vital for educational institutes. So instead of placing notice boards, Institutes can install one beacon device to each location or class. Admins can easily broadcast information, time tables, etc. to smart devices of students. even they can use them for taking their automatic attendance in the class with a time stamp. Institutes can broadcast events information and ask the student to respond to their attendance or interest. which student can immediately respond.
- Events, Seminar, Exhibitions – Due to the nature of uniqueness, beacon devices can be used as a mechanism to take info or authenticate user check-ins & check-outs to the event. Broadcast useful information during the event takes feedback from the attendees. Organizers can install beacons to each stall and provide the guide through the map, description about stall business, etc.
- Hospitals & Medicals Institutes – How it looks as if doctors come to the room in the hospital and open his iPad and get patient information automatically on the iPad. The patient or relative of the patient approves all the single procedures during his stay in the hospital during treatment. This will grow awareness that what all treatment going on with the case of the patient. Although 90% of the time patient never know what all is going on and get the huge unexpected bill at the time of discharge. Beacons can be attached to the patient so that they can make SOS calls in case of emergency or non-availability of nurses. Hospitals can track patients within the facility if by chance anyone moves out without the knowledge of health care persons.
- Security, Tracking, Log preparations – Apart from check-in, check-out, authenticate users to access points or access operations of machines. Beacons can also use for the security of expensive items in the establishment. See how it works, beacons device has been attached to the expensive items like medical machines in the hospital and they have been set up with Geo boundaries, As soon as someone takes out from assigned geo-fencing, it informs immediate manager or some person or alarms the situation. In the second case, If something is lost with-in the facility, the system can track the movement of the device and give data about the checkpoints to further investigation to find the lost object.
- Customer behavior analytics – This nature of beacon technology has hardcore benefits for different kinds of businesses. Let’s say you own a department store of cloth & fashion items, If you know which of your part of your store often visit by the customer, why customers stay more at the particular point of the store, which color of item range attracts more to the customers, etc. Imagine if you have all these customer behavior data, how high you improve the sales of your departmental store. Similarly, through beacon technology, we can gather customer behavior data for other business industries Retail, Automotive, etc.
- Tourist Places, Tourist Attractions – Tourist Places like Museums, Ancient Palaces, Antique Exhibitions, Forts, Monuments, Resorts, Etc. One problem is common to all these tourist places that are GUIDE. A guide is a person who tells you whereabouts of the place and its ancient history. Which can be sometimes a reality or just a fake story. Secondly, finding a guide who speaks your language is a tough job when you visit out of your country places & you don’t know the common language like English. Beacon is a solution to overcome this, The Government can install various beacons in the place and you can get all pre-authenticated information on your smart device with different options of your preferred languages. Even you can gain more information about the place before reaching the tourist place, so that you can prepare well with all prerequisite, etc.
- Indoor beacon tracking solutions – Google map is widely used for tracking in most of the applications. It has one limitation that it can’t work under the concrete buildings or for point to point navigation in a short distance. Here beacon-based tracking solutions works. Either it is a Large Exhibitions, Malls, Resorts, Manufacturing Units, Visitors to the big companies, hospitals, hotels, etc.
- Bonus Use case – Location-based reward systems, Location-based games to earn points, Check-in based reward points for the customer for retail outlets to increase visitors to the business.
There are hundreds of use cases that can be innovate using beacon technology, It’s an evolving technology not much largely adopted yet, it has enormous opportunity to develop new solutions in this era of IoT technology.
If you have some idea or want to discuss more with an experienced beacon app development company, you can write to us at hello@fablian.com
Fablian Technolab, Working with real ibeacon devices from last 4 years and have expertise in developing solutions in the following domains :
- Proximity Marketing Applications
- Indoor tracking beacon-based applications
- Beacon based contactless payment applications
- Beacon based health care applications
- Beacon based business utility applications
- Beacon based food industry applications
- Eddystone based application development
- ibeacon based application development
FABLIAN the best beacon application development company in India.
How to use beacons in the Restaurant or Food Takeaway or Drive Thru?
Eddystone beacon installation at Indian Railway stations by Google