“Apple’s iBeacon location sensing technology, based on the Bluetooth radio in your iPhone, promises to personalize the world around you,” John Cox reports for Network World. “For users, this increasingly popular technology changes the question of ‘Where am I?’ into the announcement ‘Here I am!'”
“An iBeacon is a Bluetooth Low Energy radio that broadcasts a signal in a given area, say the doorway to a clothing or grocery store. Your iPhone – if it has Bluetooth 4.0, and the radio is turned on, and iOS notifications and location services are active – can detect that signal and query the beacon,” Cox reports. “The beacon uses radio signal strength to figure out the phone’s location and can share that with iOS. Your phone shows an invitation from the beacon to enable something like “in-store notifications,” which involves sharing your Bluetooth-determined location.”
“Apple itself uses iBeacon in its own retail stores [see photo, above]. Customers walk into the store past an iBeacon, receive a notification to enable “in-store notifications” and if they agree, are then digitally greeted with a dashboard for that store’s location. The NFL used iBeacons at its recent “Super Bowl Boulevard” festivities along Broadway in Times Square. Later this year 20 major league baseball stadiums will feature iBeacon deployments,” Cox reports. “But the same technology is capable of supporting more advanced services in the future, including mobile payments.”
Read more in the full article here.
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