What you need to know about using Bluetooth beacons

2015 will be the year of the beacon, as companies of all sorts begin deploying these Bluetooth nodes that (at a mininum) tell a smartphone precisely where it is so that an app can act on the specific location. Apple’s iBeacons protocol, quietly released last year as part of iOS 7, has created a cottage industry of beacon makers and test deployments in retail stores, stadiums, and more as companies explore how they might increase customer engagement, sales, and service through these devices.

But the technology goes far beyond Apple’s iBeacons, or at least it can. And its uses far surpass the one that has grabbed most of the media attention: tracking shoppers to provide tailored sales pitches and coupons at specific locations of stores.

[ Welcome to the next tech revolution: Liquid computing. | Subscribe to InfoWorld’s Consumerization of IT newsletter today. ]

For example, your iPhone or an iPad loaned to you at check-in may use a beacon to show on a map where you are and provide directions to where you want to go — in your language. Your Galaxy S5 may use a beacon in your car to know it’s your vehicle and send an unlock signal to it. Your Nexus 5 may use a beacon to determine what section of a grocery store you’re in and see if anything on your shopping list is in that area, so you don’t forget it.

You can get similar information from GPS, but only in areas that have a clear view of the sky to receive satellite signals. Cellular tower triangulation can also display your location, but accuracy can be as wide as a half-mile area. For a decade, RFID technology has covered some of the promised beacons usage, but RFID requires specialized scanners and much more effort to get a read, so its uses have remained limited.

Beacons use Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), a technology built into iPhones and iPads since 2010 (and Macs since 2012) and in many higher-end Android devices since 2013. You don’t need a special reader, only the device you already have. That’s why beacons are very likely to fulfill the early location-aware dreams that RFID could not.

Simple beacons and iBeacons provide the basic foundation At least a dozen companies market beacons that use BLE radios to detect other nearby BLE devices (such as your iPhone) and send a unique user ID (UUID) to the other device. These hockey puck-size beacons cost as little as $20, use batteries that can last a year or more, and can be affixed almost anywhere. Basic beacon prices should quickly fall to $10, says Roman Foeckl, CEO of Onyx Beacons, so they’ll be affordable to install en masse.

The iPhone or iPad does the heavy lifting. iOS tracks the beacons it encounters and queries Apple’s UUID database to see what apps the beacon is associated to, then alerts the app (if installed on the iPhone or iPad) that a relevant beacon has been found. (The apps must implement Apple’s iBeacons APIs to communicate beacon status with the OS.)

This is a key distinction from, say, GPS coordinates: Beacons aren’t about sending location coordinates but about self-identifying. It’s up to you what your app does once it knows you’re near a specific beacon. You decide the context you assign to that beacon.

The app then uses that UUID to figure out a course of action. For example, a museum may designate a specific beacon’s UUID to indicate a beacon in the tyrannosaurus exhibit, so the museum app can pull up pictures, videos, audio descriptions, and so forth about that dinosaur. A savvy museum app would check the phone’s default language and automatically use it in what it displays or plays. It would also provide directions to related exhibits and engage with other beacons it encounters along the way to follow the user and adjust its recommendations or directions.

iOS’s iBeacons protocol provides very little information from the beacon — just its UUID. Likewise, it provides only the UUID of the device to the app, with no other user information. That leaves the smarts to the app, and it keeps the user private. You could use beacons to count the number of devices that come by your store or exhibit, as a proxy for the number of people, but you wouldn’t know who came by. (Of course, if a user provides personal information to the app, the app’s creator can associate the mobile device’s UUID to an actual individual.)

Other operating systems don’t have the iBeacons protocol or APIs, and so far Google and Microsoft haven’t developed an iBeacons-like API and protocol for their mobile platforms (Android and Windows Phone, respectively). But they can still use beacons — if their app developers adopt any of the APIs that the various beacons providers have developed. In these early days, lack of native Android support has not dissuaded businesses from starting beacons efforts, notes Onyx’s Foeckl; the iOS installed base is sufficiently large to justify at least pilot rollouts.

Of course, the problem is that apps using a specific vendor’s beacons APIs typically will work only with that vendor’s beacons, as there is as yet no industrywide standard. The iOS world doesn’t have the lock-in issue because every beacons vendor has, or will very soon, add iBeacons API and protocol support to their beacons. But iBeacons is iOS-only, so it doesn’t help the larger Android or smaller Windows Phone communities.

The shape of beacons to come Several beacon makers offer richer options though proprietary APIs and protocols that can do more than iBeacons does, yet their hardware still uses iBeacons for initial OS-level auto-detection and app alerting in iOS. Those vendors include Estimote, Gimbal, Onyx Beacons, and StickNFind.

As an example, StickNFind creates custom firmware for its customers, aimed at vertical industry needs. Its S Beacons protocol also communicates more than the beacon’s UUID, says COO Lior Gan-El; the beacon can transmit temperature and battery life, as well as logs on successful pairings with other devices (active connections, versus passive ones), and even user-defined packets. If this sounds a lot like active RFID transponders of a decade ago, it is. The notion is the same, he says, but the ubiquity of Bluetooth on broadly available devices means that notion can now be implemented easily and at scale.

In addition to the variety of proprietary sensors and related APIs that some beacons providers are making available for fleet-style deployments for internal use in specific industries, the beacons hardware itself is evolving. The basic units are getting smaller and smaller, with size related mainly to the battery (and thus its life). A three-year beacon is about the size of a hockey puck; a one-year beacon is perhaps half the thickness or more like a golf ball in size.

Beacons’ batteries are typically replaceable, but in some cases, swapping out a sealed beacon is cheaper than taking it apart to repace the battery, so expect to see both approaches. A battery with a removable cover is also more subject to tampering, another reason for sealed units.

On the other end of the scale, larger beacons are starting to appear that have Wi-Fi radios or Ethernet ports, so they can communicate data and status to a central management console or database à la big data systems, as well as receive updates. Some will also have dedicated power connections, so they don’t need batteries — but that means electrical wiring has to be installed in many locations.

The beacons management quandary If you deploy beacons in the iBeacons style, all you have to focus on is making sure the batteries are charged and the beacons are where they’re used to be. That’s because the beacon sends its UUID and doesn’t have anything else to be managed or secured.

Most organizations do beacon inspection the old-fashioned way: Someone checks on each beacon in person, such as a night guard or the person who opens up a store, says Onyx’s Foeckl. For beacons that store other information or that can be upgraded via Bluetooth, such a person would use an iPhone or iPad at each location to connect to a beacon. That’s not very scalable.

There is currently no way to do a Bluetooth mesh network, where beacons could communicate with each other via Bluetooth and avoid that one-by-one connection, Gan-El notes. That’s why some vendors are working on beacons with Wi-Fi and/or wired Ethernet ports built in.

But the connection issue isn’t where management ends. You need a management tool, even if it uses an intermediate Bluetooth connection between a mobile device and the beacons. (The mobile device acts as a client to the management server wherever it is.) In addition to checking on status, such management tools could be used to update firmware and pull data from them. (Some beacons support encryption and have antispoofing features, which management tools would at least query.)

There is no common management protocol for beacons, notes StickNFind’s Gan-El, and only now are some beacon vendors releasing management tools for their own beacon APIs. Beacon vendors could extend management compatibility to other vendors’ management tools, but vendors are currently trying to establish market share, so support for competitors isn’t likely in the near term, he says.

Third parties could support multiple protocols, similar to how mobile device management vendors support the various management and security APIs of iOS, Android, and Windows Phone from a common policy engine and admin console. Gan-El expects third-party beacon-management tools soon, either stand-alone or as part of other management tools.

In the meantime, the basic beacons offer a world of opportunity for app developers and businesses alike.

This article, “What you need to know about using Bluetooth beacons,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Smart User blog. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.