Beacons Enlightened

At the last week's Bluetooth Europe conference three subjects were dominating the stage: proximity beacons, wearables and smart home. Pretty obvious stuff one might say, but not so evident to many players in the three respective categories was how close and interacting and game changing the trio is.

Take wearables. They are the beacons you wear. The relationship is reversed. Stationary beacons have been sitting in shops and restaurants broadcasting their unique IDs. Bluetooth enabled smartphones have been scanning for the beacons, realizing the space around them. Now with wearable beacons the spaces around us may start scanning for the beacons, realizing the visitors passing by.

Wearable beacons are also great for smart homes. While the idea of public spaces sniffing the private wearable beacons may sound too invasive, everybody will great a contextual smart home, which is aware of its residents' whereabouts, with a smile. This is what our smart - home oriented Seed Modules do. Embedded in smart devices they not only allow for smartphone interactions. They are able to gather information about Bluetooth beacons near them and process the events locally or forward them to the home gateways / controllers. This unique feature turns any smart appliance (like a lamp or a tea kettle) into an active node of an indoor location system.

While every appliance is capable of receiving Bluetooth beacons and acting upon this information, at the same time they can act as beacons too (this is what we call a concurrent broadcaster and observer mode). So the appliances know who is present and near and smartphones can realize the surrounding environment, adjusting the user interface accordingly (things closest to me should be on top of my screen, things further away should be further down...).

And ultimately the best marriage should be between a standalone beacon and a smart lamp. Standalone beacons are a temporary phenomena. It makes absolutely no sense to make a standalone device to be just a beacon (and keep replacing batteries every three months), while any lamp, any light bulb, can be a beacon. The battery problem goes away (lamps are powered). Lamps are everywhere, so instead of finding a place for a physical beacon, some of them may be just configured to serve as beacons. And because they are multi-role and more intelligent than just the dumb broadcasting beacons, they can do more, especially run anti-spoofing challenge - response protocols on top of the standard UUID / major / minor broadcasts.

Beacons and indoor location are a huge opportunity for lamp manufacturers. The opportunity most of them are not aware of. Beacons in lamps provide a huge step forward for beacon service providers. They eliminate the physical beacons with their batteries - the extra, cumbersome prerequisite to roll out beacon - based services. At Seed we are extremely excited to continue working with both parties to provide the next level of experience.