iBeacons.Guru » Reatil

iBeacons are getting cheaper, spotted almost 50% OFF (just the beginning of huge discounts?)

ibeacons GURU — Tue, 17 Jun 2014 23:38:55 +0000

As iBeacons market becomes more and more competitive the prices start to drop. An example for that is the beacon in iblue beacon pack with 9 year battery life and 60 meter range. The high-end beacon was available by now only in limited quantities and for no less than $100 each, very interesting option as it can save a lot of on the maintenance.

We just spotted recently a huge discount available on that beacon, on sale now for only $59.95 offered by BUYibeacons.NET here: http://buyibeacons.net/index.php/9year-battery-ibeacons-long-life-beacons.html

The parameters are also very promising. 9 year iBlue beacon package, Water Resistant, 200 ft Range, SNF beacon, Security Encryption, RM CORTEX MO, TX output calibrated to +I- 1dBM, fully customizable, optional: Buzzer, LED.

There are also few other beacons at BUYibeacons.NET which seems to be the world’s first marketplace for ibeacons but we expect more like that to emerge soon.

What is iBeacon? What are iBeacons?

iBeacons.Guru — Thu, 01 May 2014 05:20:11 +0000

The term iBeacon and Beacon are often used interchangeably. iBeacon is the name for Apple’s technology standard, which allows Mobile Apps (running on both iOS and Android devices) to listen for signals from beacons in the physical world and react accordingly. In essence, iBeacon technology allows Mobile Apps to understand their position on a micro-local scale, and deliver hyper-contextual content to users based on location. The underlying communication technology is Bluetooth Low Energy.

Bluetooth Low Energy is a wireless personal area network technology used for transmitting data over short distances. As the name implies, it’s designed for low energy consumption and cost, while maintaining a communication range similar to that of its predecessor, Classic Bluetooth.

What is Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)?

How is BLE different from Regular Bluetooth?

Power Consumption: Bluetooth LE, as the name hints, has low energy requirements. It can last up to 3 years on a single coin cell battery.
Lower Cost: BLE is 60-80% cheaper than traditional Bluetooth.
Application: BLE is ideal for simple applications requiring small periodic transfers of data. Classic Bluetooth is preferred for more complex applications requiring consistent communication and more data throughput.

How does BLE communication work?

BLE communication consists primarily of “Advertisements”, or small packets of data, broadcast at a regular interval by Beacons or other BLE enabled devices via radio waves.

BLE Advertising is a one-way communication method. Beacons that want to be “discovered” can broadcast, or “Advertise” self-contained packets of data in set intervals. These packets are meant to be collected by devices like smartphones, where they can be used for a variety of smartphone applications to trigger things like push messages, app actions, and prompts.

Apple’s iBeacon standard calls for an optimal broadcast interval of 100 ms. Broadcasting more frequently uses more battery life but allows for quicker discovery by smartphones and other listening devices.

Standard BLE has a broadcast range of up to 100 meters, which make Beacons ideal for indoor location tracking and awareness.

How does iBeacon use BLE communication?

With iBeacon, Apple has standardized the format for BLE Advertising. Under this format, an advertising packet consists of four main pieces of information.

UUID: This is a 16 byte string used to differentiate a large group of related beacons. For example, if Coca-Cola maintained a network of beacons in a chain of grocery stores, all Coca-Cola beacons would share the same UUID. This allows Coca-Cola’s dedicated smartphone app to know which beacon advertisements come from Coca-Cola-owned beacons.

Major: This is a 2 byte string used to distinguish a smaller subset of beacons within the larger group. For example, if Coca-Cola had four beacons in a particular grocery store, all four would have the same Major. This allows Coca-Cola to know exactly which store its customer is in.

Minor: This is a 2 byte string meant to identify individual beacons. Keeping with the Coca-Cola example, a beacon at the front of the store would have its own unique Minor. This allows Coca-Cola’s dedicated app to know exactly where the customer is in the store.

Tx Power: This is used to determine proximity (distance) from the beacon. How does this work? TX power is defined as the strength of the signal exactly 1 meter from the device. This has to be calibrated and hardcoded in advance. Devices can then use this as a baseline to give a rough distance estimate.

Example:

A beacon broadcasts the following packet

UUID: 12345678910245

Major: 22

Minor: 2

A device receiving this packet would understand it’s from the Coca-Cola Beacon (UUID) in the Target on 1^st Street (Major) at the front of the store (Minor).

Why is iBeacon a Big Deal?

With an iBeacon network, any brand, retailer, app, or platform will be able to understand exactly where a customer is in the brick and mortar environment. This provides an opportunity to send customers highly contextual, hyper-local, meaningful messages and advertisements on their smartphones.

The typical scenario looks like this. A consumer carrying a smartphone walks into a store. Apps installed on a consumer’s smartphone listen for iBeacons. When an app hears an iBeacon, it communicates the relevant data (UUID, Major, Minor, Tx) to its server, which then triggers an action. This could be something as simple as a push message [“Welcome to Target! Check out Doritos on Aisle 3!”], and could include other things like targeted advertisements, special offers, and helpful reminders [“You’re out of Milk!”]. Other potential applications include mobile payments and shopper analytics and implementation outside of retail, at airports, concert venues, theme parks, and more. The potential is limitless.

This technology should bring about a paradigm shift in the way brands communicate with consumers. iBeacon provides a digital extension into the physical world. We’re excited to see where iBeacon technology goes in the next few years.

MFi sunglasses w/ embedded iBeacon notify you when lost, act as beacons in retail

iBeacons.Guru — Mon, 28 Apr 2014 08:07:39 +0000

act as beacons in retail

The first set of eye glasses with embedded iBeacon Bluetooth LE technology and certified under Apple’s Made-for-iPhone/iPad/iPod (MFi) program are coming soon. We’ve seen a growing number of companies embracing iBeacons by using the protocol: personalized retail experiences, in-store advertising, audience interaction at events, as well as apps that let you setup your own iBeacons at home and work. Now, a company called Tzukuri is about to launch a crowd funding project for the new eye glasses that use an embedded iBeacon to track lost glasses with accuracy to the nearest foot. They also use solar power, so charging is never an issue, and the company has big plans for using the product as a standalone iBeacon when on store shelves.

While the company behind the project is based in Australia, the glasses will be handmade in Fukui Prefecture, Japan, a region known for producing most of Japan’s handmade eyeglass frames. “Our frames are handmade in Japan by the best artisans in the world. The finest Japanese acetates are put through nearly 100-steps in the product process with 8 quality control checks. Every frame is fitted with the highest quality polarized, anti-scratch lenses with 100% UV protection.”

As for iBeacon features, the companion iOS app will automatically start sending notifications if you leave the glasses behind (at 16ft, then again at 32ft and 50ft). You’ll also be able to track your glasses “if you misplace your Tzurkuris at home, you can track distance to the nearest foot. Alternatively, in wide-open spaces, the app will save the last location you had your glasses and show you on a map.” With iBeacon post iOS 7.1, users won’t even have to open the app to get notified.

The glasses will also function as a standalone iBeacon and the company plans to take advantage of that when the product is on retail store shelves. Retail stores have been installing iBeacons in order to beam offers, product info, and more to shoppers in proximity, but it’s possible the product– in this case the Tzukuri glasses– could talk directly to the customer. The company did confirm there are “big plans on using the embedded iBeacons inside the glasses when our product is sold in retail environment.”

Initially there will be six designs inspired by icons John Lennon, Grace Kelly, Truman Capote, Atticus Finch, John Kennedy, and Tom Ford (pictured right). It’s sun glasses for now, but the company tells us it’s planning prescription glasses and notes “customers can replace the polarised lenses with clear spectacle lenses if they wish in the meantime.”

The glasses will cost $249 AUD (approx. $230 USD) on preorder through the upcoming crowd funding project, but eventually land in stores at $349 AUD suggested retail price. The company plans to ship to preorders by December 2014 – January 2015.

Apple iBeacons Explained – Smart Home Occupancy Sensing Solved?

iBeacons.Guru — Thu, 03 Oct 2013 06:14:38 +0000

Reliable occupancy sensing has long been the bane of the home automator. A PIR detects if someone moves, but once they sit down to watch TV they disappear. If you are trying to switch off lights automatically in unoccupied areas then you can soon run into problems. How many of us recognise the ‘wave your hands in the air to make the lights come back on’ scenario!

Our recent move to Indigo home automation software showed us there’s already some imaginative work being done here. Two Indigo add-ons use the presence of a smartphone on your home’s Wi-Fi network as an indication that an individual is present (check out the Smartphone Radar and Fing plugins).

But how about going a step further. How about using our smartphones to tell which room we’re in, not just which house. What we need is more than just geofencing, we need a high resolution ‘interior GPS’ for some indoor mapping.

At Apple’s iOS 7 announcement back in June there was the briefest of glimpses of a new SDK feature on one of their slides called “iBeacons”.

The system relies on Bluetooth Low Energy devices (also know as BLE, Bluetooth 4.0 or Bluetooth Smart) for calculating micro location data employing little 2.4Mhz transmitters at key locations around a building. Your smartphone or other device automatically picks up the signal from these iBeacons and can calculate relative position or trigger contextual actions. There’s still next to no information available on Apple’s main website but here’s a quote from their developer section….

iBeacon, a new class of low-powered, low-cost transmitters that can notify nearby iOS 7 devices of their presence, provides apps a whole new level of location awareness, such as trail markers in a park, exhibits in a museum, or product displays in stores.

While the majority of chatter has been about iBeacon implementation in the retail/payments and interactive tours sectors there are certainly interesting applications for the smart home.

Apple is expected to make the iBeacon protocol public soon but in the meantime there are commercially available hardware units on sale already. An example is the ‘mote’ from Estimote, another tech startup from Poland. A quick search turned up a schematic and downloadable firmware for this DIY iBeacon too. Both these units will be able to run for more than 2 years on a single coin cell battery.

We found the video below which appears to be an Apple briefing to developers on the new iBeacon features. From it we learn that when your iBeacon aware app is in the background it can perform “Region Monitoring”, presumably a less granular location service. When the app is in the foreground or when you wake your iPhone then Apple’s Core Location service can use “Ranging” for a more accurate estimate of how far you are away from the nearest beacon. This is based on signal strength and the results will put your location relative to the beacon into one of these three states – Immediate (approx 10 centimetres away), Near (approx 2 – 3 metres away), Far (approx 5 – 70 metres away). CoreMotion also takes advantage of the new M7 chip inside the latest iPhone 5s.

But what about the majority of the worlds smartphone users that are carrying Android handsets? While Google have been betting on Near Field Communication (NFC) up to now, they’ve added native support for BLE to the latest Android version 4.3. But this will need work before it has the equivalent of the iOS7 features. While iBeacons aren’t as cheap as NFC tags they are affordable – the Estimote units mentioned above are currently selling for around £60 for a set of three and who knows how low this can drop over time.

Any compatible Bluetooth LE iPhone or iPad can be a iBeacon transmitter too and Apple has already begun using one implementation of BLE iBeacons with the new ‘bump‘ setup for the Apple TV. This shows how the system can mimic some of NFC’s proximity features as well as offer a much greater variety of functions – all from a single technology. Googles superiority in cloud services isn’t in doubt though, so if it can get a competing system off the ground and can link it to an interior version of the ubiquitous Google Maps then it would be a major threat to the Apple system.

If it all works out then it’s possible to see a time in the future where you could walk out of one room, have your TV show paused and as you walk into the next room have it continue on from where you left off. Energy savings from automated lighting and heating would be a big area of interest too but the logic required for this sort of thing isn’t as trivial as it might seem. That said, companies like Idratek are working on the sorts of algorithms that could use iBeacons to produce these intelligent and autonomous actions.

There are bound to be issues here though. Will the system think you are in the lounge when you’re actually in the bedroom above or the kitchen next door? Will merely adding more iBeacons round the home increase accuracy and solve this issue? What about enrolling visitors to the house onto the system? What if we leave our phone in one room and walk to another (if only Apple was developing a wearable device, like a watch or something). And won’t this all just turn into a new vector for spam, with a new ad pinging us every time we walk past a shop?

The new 802.11ah Wi-Fi standard is due in 2015 / 2016 which has been designed to support the sort of sensor networks suited to Home Automation. Will this provide a multitude of ‘free’ beacons built into our Internet of Things for a more accurate triangulation setup? We’ll know more about iBeacons by this time next year, but whatever happens it’s clear there are interesting times ahead. Let us know what you think in the comments below.

apple.com : bluetooth.org : estimote.com : gelosite.com

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