After a few months of hard work hand in hand with Google to develop it, Eddystone is finally here. Few companies have collaborated to create the most complete beacon concept. Find out more about what Eddystone is and what it can do for you and your business.
What is EDDYSTONE?
Eddystone is an open beacon format, which means that you can use it without barriers and even contribute to expand it and make it better through the community platform.
We’re not telling you anything new, however more news will come in hand of the guys from California.
Three Beacons in one
The main advantages of this protocol over the rest of the current ones are that it allows you to set and send three different advertising packets (frame types).
- Eddystone-UID: This is equivalent to the well-known iBeacon advertising packet, with a specific ID to trigger actions in your app.
- Eddystone-URL: Do you remember The Physical Web? This is basically the same advertising packet, but now integrated on this super beacon.
- Eddystone-TLM (Telemetry): Most of you have been asking to put different sensors on the beacon to create disruptive use cases. Now, all this contextual information could be reported through this third advertising packet available. The perfect way also to monitoring your deployments in terms of battery, temperature, humidity, etc.
iOS and Android supported
Now Eddystone is officially supported on both operative systems. Since last week, Google Chrome for iOS (and is expected that Android version arrives soon) has integrated the Phyiscal Web. That means that you can now deploy Eddystone format beacons to interact with Chrome users, and stay in the pocket of millions of people without the need to create an specific app and force people to download it. But it doesn’t affect the user’s privacy in any way.
Our case study:Volkswagen connect
Accent Systems has been working with leader companies to go a step forward and we have already great examples about how to integrate Eddystone successfully.
With Volkswagen Spain, Accent System has developed a smart key fob to help VW’s owners to find their keys, their mobiles or even make a selfie!
The key fob communicates with the app using ID packets helping you to make bip the phone if it’s near to you but you don’t see it, also the app can activate a bip in the key fob with the same purpose, etc.
But the main revolution is that if your keys are out of range, you could activate through a server the URL packet to broadcast an ask to Chrome users for some help, even if they don’t have the VWconnect app.
How IBKS helps you to your IoT strategy
With iBKS beacons you could even combine data packets to communicate with app users and the rest of the people at same time, sending different messages to each one. For example, you could offer a great loyalty program in an app, while at the same time you could recommend to other users to download the app from the App Store through Physical Web.
You can get your iBKS Eddystone compliant here, but remember that if you already have some iBKS 105 you can update it following the tutorial and downloading the last firmware update.