“You step inside Walmart and your shopping list is transformed into a personalized map, showing you the deals that’ll appeal to you most,” Kyle Vanhemert writes for Wired. “You pause in front of a concert poster on the street, pull out your phone, and you’re greeted with an option to buy tickets with a single tap. You go to your local watering hole, have a round of drinks, and just leave, having paid—and tipped!—with Uber-like ease. Welcome to the world of iBeacon.”
“It sounds absurd, but it’s true: Here we are in 2013, and one of the most exciting things going on in consumer technology is Bluetooth. Indeed, times have changed. This isn’t the maddening, battery-leeching, why-won’t-it-stay-paired protocol of yore,” Vanhemert writes. “Today we have Bluetooth Low Energy which solves many of the technology’s perennial problems with new protocols for ambient, continuous, low-power connectivity. It’s quickly becoming big deal.”
“Gadgets talking to other gadgets is only part of the allure. Even more novel is the promise of letting our devices talk to the world around us, whether we’re in a bar, a bookstore, or a ballpark. That’s precisely the future Apple is quietly laying the tracks for with a little-known iOS 7 feature called iBeacon,” Vanhemert writes. “Standalone iBeacons [are] low-cost gizmos that continually beam out a Bluetooth signal, running for up to a year on a small watch battery. These are the types of transmitters that will open the physical world to our digital devices. The barista at your local coffee shop may already know your face, but with an iBeacon stuck to its front window, that coffee shop will be able to know your smartphone, too. Where does that leave us? We’re already starting to see hints of the possibilities, and only a handful of them involve coupons.”
Much more in the full article here.
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