Recently, whilst talking about BLE beacons and my recent endeavours with them, Wojtek Borowicz from Estimote and I crossed paths and he was kind enough to agree to answer some of my questions on Bluetooth Beacons for Dev Diner. BLE beacons are a very exciting technology and one which is really starting to take off! I’m hoping to have a few more interviews on this space in the weeks to come – stay tuned!

Could you explain BLE beacons and what developers might be able to use them for?

Beacons are small radio transmitters. In layman’s terms, they use Bluetooth to shout My name is XYZ and I’m here! Mobile apps can listen to a beacons’ signal and use it to identify beacons and approximate the distance. This unlocks the power of microlocation with granularity that wasn’t available to developers before.

Most common examples include retail apps (You’re in the jackets section, here’s a 20% off coupon for jackets), small businesses (Welcome to our cafe! Tap to order today’s lunch) and museums (This is Mona Lisa…) but there are countless other uses for beacons. We’ve seen them deployed in airports, in hospitals and even in nuclear facilities. Location context can enhance almost any kind of app.

An example of Estimote beacons in a museum

An example of Estimote beacons in a museum

There are Bluetooth beacons out there by a range of companies, in what areas/situations are Estimote beacons better suited compared to the others?

We keep repeating that we’re not just a hardware company. The power of Estimote is the whole stack. Beacons with additional sensors and powerful firmware are the foundation of our product, but the big picture includes security mechanisms, power saving features, fleet management in the cloud, sophisticated Indoor Location software, SDKs and APIs that make developing context-aware apps easier, and much more.

What are your favourite uses of BLE beacons out in the wild?

I love how beacons are helping with hospitality and loyalty apps. Take Downtown, that makes ordering and paying for food frictionless, or Adored and Wisely that help restaurants engage customers.

When it comes to less typical uses of Estimote Beacons, Robin is doing an amazing job with turning offices smart: finding colleagues and booking rooms is much easier with microlocation.

What skills would you recommend developers have before starting to build effective apps with BLE beacons?

Right now we have SDKs for iOS and Android, so you need to know your Swift/Objective-C/Java. There are also cool third party tools for PhoneGap and Xamarin.

What are the key things developers need to keep in mind whilst developing apps that rely on BLE beacons?

That’s a subject worthy of a book… or at least a chapter. Integrating beacon support into your apps introduces another dimension to the user experience: the physical world. You need to think about not only how people will interact with your app, but also how the app will help them interact with the space. Where to place beacons, how to adjust their settings for optimal performance, how to avoid signal bleed, how to balance the number of notifications? Will the user have the app on screen and will see content immediately, or will the actions be triggered with the screen locked: and if so, what’s the time window for the notification to be relevant between triggering a location-based event and the user seeing it? And the list goes on.

When designing an app, you need to make thousands of small decisions that will come together to create UI that either does or doesn’t work. When the world around becomes part of the interface, you need to add another thousand.

I wrote a piece about this for UX Mag with my colleague Piotr. Feel free to read it if you’re interested in designing apps for the physical world.

Is there any way outside of iOS or Android app development to use an Estimote beacon? Any way of using them in web apps?

There’s the PhoneGap plugin mentioned above. Also, beacons can broadcast URL addresses thanks to a standard introduced by Google, called Eddystone.

You still need an app to detect those URLs, but Google is working on integrating Eddystone into its own apps and services. It’s already part of Chrome for iOS and support for Google Maps and Google Now is coming soon.

What are the differences between the iBeacons and Eddystone beacon implementations?

iBeacon and Eddystone are two protocols for BLE beacons, introduced by Apple and Google respectively. They work in a similar way, letting apps in range detect and identify beacons. The twist is that Eddystone also allows for broadcasting URL addresses: thanks to the integration with Chrome, and further support for other Google services in line, that will be powerful.

We’ve published a more in-depth comparison of iBeacon and Eddystone on the Estimote Developer Portal.

Is Estimote more suited to one implementation over the other?

We don’t tell developers that they should be building this or that with beacons and it pays off: we’ve been amazed by their creativity. With use cases spanning churches, hotels, and nuclear facilities, our community brought to life more ideas that we could ever think of. If you’re looking for inspiration, visit our Community Portal, where we’ve gathered almost 100 case studies.

Thanks to Wojtek for taking the time out to talk about BLE beacons! You can find him on Twitter at @Esti_Wojtek.

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