Beacons: The explanation and implementation

Digital disruption is the other side of digital opportunity. Established businesses and startups alike enlist innovative technologies in the fight to remove incumbents, protect entrenched positions, or re-invent entire business activities. This is the place where Beacons are born. Beacons are a new way to send notifications. Let us begin from the beginning and see what are beacons, why are they used and discuss a real life case.

Beacons are small, battery-powered, always-on physical devices working on BLE technology transmitting a continuous radio signal to smart devices such as smartphones or tablets that come in the range of about 300 feet. In a way, Beacons are a one-way transmitter where they send the signals but cannot receive a signal from the device receiving it.

Generally, there are two type of Beacons. One that connects to your phone with Bluetooth and others have a dedicated mobile app installed on a smart device that receives the signals. Apple's iBeacon was the first standardized BLE beacon platform. The company introduced the technology during its summer 2013 Worldwide Developers Conference, when it added iBeacon support to iOS 7. The iBeacon platform lets developers build mobile apps that can receive transmissions, such as location-aware notifications, from iBeacon-compatible devices.

Today this technology has gained so much importance especially for marketing purposes that now Beacons can be connected to any smart device working on of the popular OS, however, the biggest players for Beacons remain as Apple and Google. Beacons are highly popular at brick-and-mortar stores where Beacons can provide a highly personalized experience. Beacons can also help marketers gain more detailed customer insights, which in turn help in re-targeting.

One such interesting cases that I came across is about a Museum in India where Cygnet Infotech offered a scalable Android and iOS mobile application integrated with the Beacons along with real-time in-house GPS tracking, continuous advertising and push-notifications enabled with geofencing. These Beacon devices transmit details of each historical monument to the mobile app as and when a person passes through it. It really makes an interesting case of Beacon.

I would like to have your comments on what do you think of Beacons and discuss let us discuss its utilisation in different businesses.

Hemang Rindani is an Inbound marketer at Cygnet Infotech who likes to write about Mobile Applications, Seo and Social Media.