Category: Beacons

Improving on Beacon Immediate, Near and Far

We recently highlighted an article on Beacon Trajectory Smoothing. Faheem Zafari, Ioannis Papapanagiotou, Michael Devetsikiotis and Thomas Hacker have a new paper on An iBeacon based Proximity and Indoor Localization System (pdf) that also uses filtering.

They use a Server-Side Running Average (SRA) and Server-Side Kalman Filter (SKF) to improve the proximity detection accuracy compared to Apple’s immediate, near and far indicators.

The researchers found:

The current (Apple) approach achieved a proximity detection accuracy of 65.83% and 67.5% in environment 1 and environment 2 respectively. SRA achieved 92.5% and 96.6% proximity detection accuracy which is 26.7% and 29.1% improvement over the current approach in environment 1 and 2 respectively

What’s interesting here is that the researchers have quantified the accuracy of Apple’s implementation in two scenarios. The accuracy isn’t that good and as the researchers have shown, can be improved upon significantly.

Thoughts on the Interview with CEO of Gimbal

The site for the forthcoming The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Beacosystem book has a new video interview with Jeff Russakow, CEO of Gimbal. Here are some insights from the interview.

Most beacon projects need an app. Gimbal is partnering with companies such as Shazam to get Beacon detection working on larger numbers of phones and then convincing those users to install a more specific app for a for more immersive experience. This made us wonder whether Eddystone-URL/the Physical Web could also provide this function. Could Eddystone URL be used to convince the user to install a specific app for a for more immersive experience?

Jeff talks of providing experiences rather than coupons. Experience is not a coupon. It’s important to know your customer (through context, including via beacons), before pushing coupons.

The video mentions some interesting usecases for banks. There are also a large range of things that can be done automatically for users when they reach a location. Beacons can also be used to provide analytics. Not analytics about triggered coupons or experiences but web analytics for the physical world. Simply knowing where people are and what they are doing can aid other business processes.

The conclusion is that beacon technology is relatively mature but under-commercialised. It offers new, varied opportunities, especially outside the marketing world. We agree with Jeff’s view is that industry could do with more thought leadership.

BeaconZone Mentioned in SD Times Article

sdtimesThe SD Times has a new article, by Alexandra Weber Morales on Why developers are sitting pretty for IoT.

The article explains how mobile developers such as ourselves are moving to the IoT and how beacons are part of the IoT. Other important areas for IoT are (big) data and security. The article concludes with several ways to get started and explore the IoT.

You might also like to read an article on Beacons and IoT that we wrote on LinkedIn last January.

iB004 PLUS Sensor Beacon Available

We now have a limited number of iB004 PLUS beacons in stock with an additional SHT20 temperature/humidity sensor. The iB004 is one of the most commonly used (and re-branded) beacons and the ‘PLUS’ part means it has a larger CR2477 battery rather than the CR2450 in the original iB004. The larger battery means there’s a longer 100m (vs 70m) range and longer battery life.

ib004plus-temp_smaller

The temperature/humidity version has a small hole in the top to allow the environment, external to the case, to be sensed.