Indoor Positioning is tied in with making an indoor version of Google Maps. This innovation will end up one of the most critical developments of the following 10 years. An ever-increasing number of industries find Indoor Location-Based services for their own special utilize cases (ex. Navigation at large scale trade shows, high-value asset tracking or Industrial)) to enable themselves to enhance productivity and work streams and in addition increment consumer loyalty.

There are some drawbacks, which you should try to avoid and make your project as successful.

Let’s see here top 3 mistakes to avoid for Indoor Positioning.

1. Using Beacons that are low on battery

Currently, this first one may appear clearly, however dependably ensure your Beacons are completely full charged before mounting them on walls. Their batteries more often than not have a lifespan of around three years. You would prefer not to do the entire starting setup and following a half year discover that it doesn’t work properly any longer, since, you got it, you Beacons’ batteries are useless.

Requesting new Beacons, configuring and installing them again to be utilized for your setup takes as much time as is an unnecessary setback you definitely want to avoid.

1. Installing Beacons without really knowing where and how to

Beacon installation is an important procedure before you can start your project. In any case, you should remember, that in order to make your installation work and be as specific as possible, you should follow some simple guidelines.

When you start to put them up in random location, follow these 5 tips for beacon installation:

• Don’t place the Beacons too far away from the smartphone user, e.g. don’t mount them on a 6m high ceiling.
• Consider the size of each room you want to place them in when choosing the amount of Beacons.
• You should not place the Beacons inside or onto signal blocking or metal objects like light fixtures, stone floors etc.
• Leave enough space between the Beacons. One every 8–10 meters.
• Last but not least, don’t think too economically. You don’t want to have a non-working infrastructure because you didn’t purchase enough Beacons. Use our Beacon Calculator as a measure for the approximate number of Beacons you require.

1. Using maps that do not match the actual physical environment

In order to enable Indoor Navigation and Proximity in real time on your phone, one of the most important steps is to upload a map of the respective building.

With an out-of-date map, you will fail to take correct ground truths due to the absence of reference points and the building cannot be mapped (Radio data created).

Key Findings Points:

• Check your Beacon’s battery life
• Check instructions on how to position Beacons correctly
• Make sure the map you are using is matching with the actual physical floor plan
• Set the right scale for your building on the map

Final Note:

Here you need to know top 3 Indoor Positioning mistakes to avoid when you are using beacons. If you have any query regarding beacons installation, battery life or how to beacon work for indoor location and how to track the records? GoTekt is the perfect tracking solution services provider and store various types of beacons.

Source: https://indoo.rs/indoor-positioning-tips/

There are many benefits when using Bluetooth Low Energy (or short BLE) to connect between mobile phones and other gadgets. In any case, if your job is to execute this communication on Android chances are high that some stuff just won’t work.

The most recent two years GoTekt have done numerous BLE- applications for our clients and here we provide you some tips regarding BLE on Android App.

• The BLE stack on iOS is normally more reliable and stable. If you consider the peripheral might be surrey attempted to utilize an iOS gadget to counter-check.
• BLE on Android 4.3 and 4.4 is actually surrey. On the off chance that conceivable target Android >= 5.0. Truly. On Android 4.4 we regularly could crash the Bluetooth stack so hard that we needed to reboot the phone to make them work once more.
• The version of BLE on Android 6.0 has actually improved. Also, the new scanner introduced in 5.0 is way better than the old one. Its maybe hope so!

For the other specific points are:

• If BLE-API is asynchronous then You may call BluetoothGatt#readCharacteristic() and instantly after that do another read. You might expect that there is a queue and that eventually you will receive two callbacks one for each read. Well, that won’t happen. You always have to wait for one GATT operation to finish before you can start another one. Otherwise the result is undefined. Use a state machine — it will save you a lot of trouble. Note: You won’t receive an Exception if you do several GATT operations in parallel.
• Always make sure your connections are closed if no longer needed. Use BluetoothGatt#close() for that. Otherwise your app might work some time but after reaching a device specific connection limit stuff will get flaky. Same as above: You won’t get an exception if you hit that limit — new connections will simply fail without proper error message.
• Filtering for specific devices while scanning is totally broken in Android < 5.0. Even with Android 5.0 it doesn’t work for all filter criteria. So filter manually and later carefully optimize on real devices.
• Doing BluetoothGatt#writeCharacteristic() with more than 20 Bytes payload won’t work with all devices. To be on the save side only write chunks of 20 Bytes. Again use a state machine for that.

Source : http://www.kodira.de/2016/08/tips-ble-android/

Today, Beacons helpful to a shopping mall to pick up a more prominent understanding of their customer feelings and propensities. What areas of the shopping mall attract in the most footfall? What number of application customers shopped at specific outlets and to what extent did they remain in the shopping centre?

Let’s watch video of using iBeacon in Shopping Mall Give Good Time to Shopper

The shopping mall can develop a rich customer profile based on exclusive shopper communications and their offline performance. This information can be used to target customers with a customized item or product suggestions and support rehash visits. It also supports the brand to settle on productive information-driven choices and implement marketing techniques that promote sales and customer reliability.

Shopping centres can convey customized application engagement based on a customer’s proximity to points of interest and their unique profile. Through this way, they can send push and in-application messages to tell customers about various new offers such as sale, discount, and store opening and also offer the most recent films at the cinema. Proximity-based engagement can also help customers locate specific shops, restaurants, and services in the centre.

The main aim of location-based engagement is to increase the value of the shopper’s shopping experience through the delivery of contextually related messaging like offers, sales, discount and many more. This is the reason it’s extremely important for retail marketers to focus on vastly targeted customer selection and customized messaging.

Therefore, proximity marketing help to increase the extra revenue streams for the shopping mall. Current retail renters can rent the shopping mall’s beacon network to influence beacon-based engagement opportunities with their in-store customers. Advertiser brands can use nearness data to provide highly focused retargeting campaigns to customers based on offline behavioural experience.

Final note:

Today, many shopping malls used beacons technology and it provides extreme opportunity to renovate the customer experience and improve their loyalty. Location-based engagement through enhanced the customer traffic and increase service efficiencies, while offering quality value to the customer. Now, this innovative beacon technology opens the door to the shopping mall and give advance advertising revenue opportunities for retail development brands.

Nowadays, Wireless communications technology is undergoing non-stop development. Thus, numerous new wireless technologies are rising, and the current ones are being enhanced. RFID (Radio-frequency identification) innovative technology has been on the market for a long time now.

Most well-known and popular company Apple Inc. has launched a different and advanced wireless technology. The name of wireless technology is iBeacon — indoor positioning system has developed in November 2013.It utilizes low- powered transmitters to update the manifestation of iOS 7 devices. It allows the smartphones and other devices to perform tasks when they are in nearness with iBeacon. This innovative technology depends on the BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) technology.

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is used for two types of efficient tracking objects such as animate and inanimate. The main purpose of RFID tags is connected these two kinds of objects for identification. RFID provides two kinds of tags — Active Tag & Passive Tag.

Active RFID tags

– Power Source in the form of a battery.

– Reading range is up to 100 meters.

Passive Tags

• Don’t have their own power source.
• Reading range is limited.

Active RFID tags and iBeacon — both are slightly similar in function. iBeacon technology is also used battery-powered and help to send signals as well. There are several benefits of RFID over iBeacon.

Final Note:

Dissimilar to RFID tags, iBeacon can’t be attached to items or products. The cost of RFID innovation technology is relatively equivalent to the iBeacon. Likewise, the organizations are searching for advanced technology that is not sure to support a single device. Rather, they search for advances technologies supporting numerous devices and plan.

Nowadays, indoor location technology has blast-off and brings a lot of buzz over the industries from healthcare to retailers. However, it’s no more discussion about only Wi-Fi — the overview of beacon devices but also including iBeacon technology — these both are added, a new feature to location technology for IT industries and this innovative technology through improving their business better and increase the reach of customers.

A few customers have been getting some information about beacon technology and how it fits in with Wi-Fi, so we should begin from the earliest starting point:

Know about Beacon Technology:

Beacons are one type of sensors and that send out tracking tags to Bluetooth low energy (BLE). These sensors can be located around a place such as a retail store, hospital and a cell phone device can pick up the BLE signal and decide the limit that it is in near proximity. Once a mobile app is built off of this innovative technology, it can be very useful in different ways and also interact with the end user. Also, this app through sends a notification to customers for the promotion of the products like special offers, discount, and others.

Benefit of Beacon Technology

The main benefit of beacons is inexpensive and easy to arrange. They can provide rough, proximity-based indoor location for an improved visitor experience. This allows companies to communicate to their customers based on their specific location and when joined with other inside navigation technologies, can offer an excellent service. But the main drawback of the beacon can be costly to manage. For one, they are battery-controlled and require steady upkeep, and they likewise can be moved, stolen, or copied, which can negotiation the whole engagement experience.

Benefit of Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi has a wide range of use cases, from worker to visitor facing. For organizations, Wi-Fi continues to provide anytime and anywhere network access, making them more useful than ever before. Wi-Fi technology used in a different sector, such as healthcare professionals with a mission-critical medical information, educators with online learning tools, retailers with mobile point of sale kiosks, and the list goes on.

In the retail industry, Wi-Fi provides more guest access requirement and indoor location services. When industries connect their customers or visitors to Wi-Fi, they can provide you total and unknown location data analytics — for example, proximity detection (how many people visited the place), average stay time, where the most of the people are lodged, and how many people connected to the Wi-Fi network. However, Wi-Fi location, driven by current Wi-Fi infrastructure alone lacks the granularity the beacon deployments can give.

Wi-Fi or beacons or both?

Wi-Fi and Beacons — both are useful in different ways, but these two depend upon the organization requirements and according to choose it.

– If you need only employee connectivity, then you’re probably ok with just Wi-Fi.
 — Are you searching for visitor availability? Once more, Wi-Fi is sufficient.
 — Also the requirement of location analytics? You’ll need a location-enabled Wi-Fi set-up.
 — Do you want to engage more customers when they are in the place or provide an indoor navigation experience? You should need to investigate beacon technology alongside applications that give the two-way communication.

Final note:

Without any doubt! Both are useful in different ways. Here we describe the some of the key points when Wi-Fi and beacon technology are most useful in indoor locations.

Source:https://blogs.cisco.com/wireless/indoor-wifi-location-and-beacons-better-together

Did you know that most of 90% of the guest time is spent far from the hotels? There are different ways to identify and provide a better guest experience that drives additional income, engagement and customer satisfaction for your brand. Today, beacon technology is the most innovative technology and it has the capability to provide the way how to more guests interact with hotels.

What is bluetooth beacon technology?

The beacon is little, outlined, an area-based sensor that can be located anyplace in a Hotel or the outer location. If guests are using smartphone’s Bluetooth then hotel guest can get a message with the greeting and also provide useful or promotional information during their stay at your hotel, via push notification. These types of messages and information through creating real-time interaction with your customers with the purpose of enhancing your hotel’s engagement and increase the revenue.

Benefits for the hotel itself

Beacon technology is still new to the hotel industry. But this technology provides an innovative way to interact with your guest individually while delivering custom-made marketing messages during their stay at your hotel.

– Improve guest experience and engage with guests on a more friendly level

– Generate new, revenue channels and increase the up-selling amenities opportunities.

– Added more efforts to build trust and loyalty, engagement and retain customers.

– Marketing of add-ons hotel facilities during guests’ stay.

– Data Analytics provides useful information on their Guest’s activity, so as to improve their overall experience and amenities. By outdoor setup your property with beacons at the bar, restaurant, lobbies, pool and other areas, you can easily identify the profit area and time spent by guest at these areas. Also, you can measure in which area, guests spent most time of the day, accordingly to offer plans and rewards.

Beacons technology through improving your hotel staff’s efficiency such as finding which rooms are prepared for cleaning, either has been looked at or guest free. Thus, your cleaners never need to knock on a door and bother your guests.

Benefits for guests:

The beacons — location base technology offer several benefits. This technology can improve great and hassle-free experience during the guests stay at your hotel. Here we explain some of the services which can help you:

Avoidance of long check-in queues: The moment they walk into the lobby, within the range of the beacon located there, they are identified, and a message is generated to their phones. As a result, they facilitate the process of mobile check — in.

Hotel special offers and loyalty programs: Using beacons, you can define targeted alerts, an offer or a special discount for a beverage to a guest who is already at the bar. Also, you can customize promotions to specific locations in the hotel premises and send them right to your guest’s smartphone.

Messages about hotel services or specials events: Beacons can inform guests about highlights or related events near or inside your hotel.

Final Note:

Use beacon technology and make your guest’s stay more special and relevant. Also, this technology provides several benefits like improved guest experience, increase the quality of hotel amenities and services. If your hotel uses a beacon-based strategy you will definitely enhance your brands and also impress your guests.

Source:https://tourismart.co/blog/power-of-beacons-technology-in-hotels

On July 2015, Google entered into beacon technology world when it developed Eddystone, two years after Apple Company also enter into beacons space and introduced beacon technology. Currently, Apple and Google — both giant companies saw a lot of traction. Nowadays, companies have started finding opportunities to influence innovative application, choices of beacons and beacon-enabled app development to offer a whole user experience to consumers.

Eddystone and iBeacon — both are communication protocols. The main role of beacons sends out a signal of Bluetooth at specific intervals, and the communication protocols define the format that makes up the signal.

iBeacon

– iBeacon have 3 kind of transmits a UUID, a Major, and a Minor value (16, 4 and 4 digits respectively).
 — One quick notice: beacons do not do the tracking.
 — iBeacon needs an app to receive, process and/or track the beacon.
 — Works with iOS and Android, but native to iOS (works better with iOS).

Eddystone

– Eddystone can send 3 different frame-types: Eddystone-UID, Eddystone-URL, or Eddystone-TLM.
 — Eddystone-UID is essentially identical to that of the iBeacon.
 — Eddystone-URL tells a smartphone or device to open an URL. Does not require developers app to be installed, only the latest Chrome application.
 — Eddystone-TLM sends data from sensors, for example, tracking temperature so you can control the temperature in a warehouse.
 — Cross-platform, meaning it works well with not only iOS and Android, but any processor that supports Bluetooth beacons.
 — Powers Physical Web applications

Which are the Best?

• iBeacon is simple to implement, has more documentation, but less features.
• Eddystone has more features and sends more information than iBeacon, but it is more complicated to integrate.

Difference Between Eddystone and iBeacon

Apple’s iBeacon

iBeacon technology is a beacon protocol that has been built into Apple’s iOS 7 and later versions of mobile operating system that allows iPhones and iPads to constantly scan for Bluetooth devices nearby. Beacons use Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) which is a part of Bluetooth 4.0 specification.

It is Android and iOS compatible, but native only for iOS.

It is a proprietary software. Thus, the specification is controlled by Apple. It is simple to implement.

UUIDs, one of the components in the advertising packet, are basically tied in to the developer’s server. Therefore, when it is sent to a smartphone, the device would need a specific app to do a particular task with the information received. Therefore, a mobile app is necessary to receive messages via iBeacon.

There is no specific feature such as Ephemeral Identifiers (EIDs) in iBeacon. The signal transmitted by a beacon is a public signal and can be detected by any iOS device and certain Android devices with proper specifications.

Apple has no specific API made available for iBeacon fleet management. Application Program Interface (API) is a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications. It specifies how software components should interact.

Google’s Eddystone

Google’s Eddystone, formerly called UriBeacon, is a beacon protocol for open-source beacons which could be manufactured by any business at an affordable cost.

It is Android and iOS compatible. In fact, it is cross-platform and thus is compatible with any platform that supports BLE beacons.

It is open-source. The specification is published openly on GitHub, under the open-source Apache v2.0 license, so that businesses and developers can access and contribute to it.

It is flexible but requires more complicated coding when it comes to integration, since it sends more packets of information than iBeacon.

Eddystone, on the other hand, sends out URL in place of UUID, which can simply open in a web browser vis-à-vis specific apps. For iOS devices, it is supported by Chrome with the ‘Today’ notifications enabled, whereas for Android devices, it is supported on the ‘Physical Web’ browser.

Eddystone has a built-in feature called EIDs that constantly change and allow beacons to broadcast a signal that can only be identified by ‘authorized clients’.

Eddystone has an advantage here since Google has launched two APIs (Nearby API and Proximity Beacon API) that makes Eddystone beacons more powerful. These APIs also make beacon fleet management much easier.

Beacons should be the friend in need of physical stores in their fight against eCommerce sites. It has been a long time since the beacon system was declared, and at this point, we also have other challenging proximity marketing technologies likes, Eddystone and Wi-Fi Aware.

Today not only retailers are using beacons to sell more, but beacons can be used in public places such as museums, public transit, and even in restaurants. Nowadays, the beacon technology becomes more popular and build up a lot of media attention. So, many retailers are still adopting this technology with feasibility and cost-benefit analysis.

In this blog post, we will discuss 4 strategies to run a successful beacon marketing program.

1. Stop spamming your customers

Beacons are one of the great ways to connect with your consumers and send them special offers. Sometimes many retailers send them special offers but this doesn’t mean that you should spam them with special offers every time they are within the range of your store or walking around the store. If you send overload message to a customer then make the bad effect for customers and sometimes many customers uninstall the app. Customers buying experience and messages based on relevant information — both give you a better conversion rate as compared to a mass promotion.

2. Focus on the Customer Experience

Many retailers are developing the additional mobile app for the users, they want to confirm that the application can’t simply be an “empty” application fit for pushing just “Special Offer” messages, but also able to require user-friendly information and providing a seamless user experience. So, the application should require a user-friendly and able to provide various kinds of features such as product details, store locations, and feedback forms.

3. Know your equipment

Today, there are lots of beacons manufacturers companies in the market, that companies need to do research about beacons technology and after using it. When retailers want to install beacons, then first they will check some features such as Battery consumption rates, beacon range, temperature changes, exposure to rain and snow and many more.

The important things of beacons have the specific firmware manufacture and that affects the battery life of the device. Also, transmit power and marketing interval can influence battery life. Retailers should also set up beacons in a place where they can confirm maximum coverage which significantly decreases the beacon positioning costs.

4. Know your software

There are a number of companies building beacons software, for example, Google Eddystone, Apple ibeacon, AltBeacon (Radius Networks), etc. Over this, application organizations are building their own particular customized solutions that help retailers get the greatest value out of beacons.

Final Note:

Here GoTekt provides some of the basic strategies of beacon marketing, that’s useful to retailers. This strategy through retailers are easily reaching out to the customers. Use a proper strategy in a location, your beacons advertisings can give you a better ROI and increase your sales.

Source: https://www.softwebsolutions.com/resources/5-strategies-to-run-a-successful-beacon-marketing-program.html

Over the centuries, Technology has become an important part of each and every phase of real life and business including marketing. With rising utilization of cell phones, utilization of innovative technology among significant online movement. For this intention, select right solution — the iBeacon.

Know about important things of iBeacon

• iBeacons are decent choice compare to Beacons. While beacons only show unique identifier numbers, but Apple supports iBeacons by identifying those numbers and knowing the range.

• Make all features extremely convincing, so users turn on their Blue tooth gadgets and location services. You have just a single change to request user permit. So, be sensible.

• The main features of ibeacon are the battery efficient monitoring. Also, confirm that the app obviously indicates battery efficiency and even encourages them to keep the Bluetooth feature turned on.

• Secure User data and information. Location wise track the record of Beacon region.

• Bluetooth beacons are normally one kind of radios, sometimes it’s time-consuming and messy. Check the signals and adjust to make sure you get the best signal.

While the previously mentioned focuses are only a few difficulties developers and users may look in beacon-enabling applications, there are more to it. Indeed, even the most experienced iOS developer is experiencing challenges with iBeacon due to its special qualities and features.

1. Optimal of Features
Beacon technology is one kind of unique location-based technology, it permits the application to the physical distance to the broadcasting beacon. For example, if beacons are at its identified location, you can get a reasonable idea as to where the user is situated within a specific radius. A beacon can even be attached to different gadgets or installations like a train car, balloon, stadium, etc.

If the app identifies the user, it can map the user and its beacon. With backend direction for mapping, you can even connect data identified with the beacons, its customer, this present reality setting, and irritate particular setting to a customer — an exact time, area, and application setting.

If you develop ibeacon app, then you have to carefully evaluate the features that can possibly improve user experience, though not amazing. Similarly, you must be thinking about user privacy protection factor without devastating an application in the case if the beacon isn’t inside a range.

2. Problems with Hardware and Signals
Several applications have been developed as secure and well-mannered systems. But when you develop beacons apps, then you must be ready to deal with outside signals and radios. Fortunately, the iOS SDK manages a portion of the complexities engaged in identifying signals, error correction, decoding and much more. What’s more, the Bluetooth LE, or Low-Energy, range lies in a similar range band as the Wi-Fi interface, which can impede the flag.

The signal quality may fluctuate uncontrollably among various iBeacon equipment manufacturers. According to the broadcast, beacon signals are frequently affected by device power, temperature, polling intervals. Specifically, signal accuracy differs and that shows that the app should be designed to make choices depending on the type and variable information that has been received.

3. Exploring the application store

Exploring the application store is the last test one needs to confront. The procedure is a learning, knowledge and here’s an essence:

• It is basic to obviously clarify what a specific application should do, or do, both out in the open description and in review notes.

• Demonstration a demo video and describe app functions.

• Offer a demo record and beacons UUIDs in review notes.

• Contain battery disclaimer toward the end of the description.

Final Note:

Do you know developing ibeacon app is definitely quite different from developing any other app? For ibeacon app development requires pre-built tools, client library extensions, this is advance the process of developing. If you are using beacons, then beacons need to manage user permissions and expectations, coding well compared to unpredictable hardware collections, and give a link to interface a signal identifier with a valuable component in the application.

Today, Mobile Technology is an innovation of real life, it helps to provide solutions to a wide variety of problems. Mobile and related technologies such as WI-Fi, GPS, NFC, and beacons are definitely good impacting both personal life and enterprises and also various industries. Mobile phones are providing better support in the healthcare industry and also people such as patients, consumers, healthcare providers. Therefore, Mobile Health has become a vital part of today’s digital world, where doctors and patients alike are prolific mobile adopters.

Location-based technologies is a play vital role in the healthcare industry. This technology-focused by mobile is fast gaining power in health care and can be connected to a host of functions like keeping tabs on devices, assets, and patients. The iBeacon technology can be deployed in the healthcare industry and provide more effective and efficient solutions with the help of a wide variety of location-based applications.

Watch the video of How to Beacon Technology use in Healthcare Industry.

Gotekt — Beacon Technology In Healthcare

An advantage of set up Beacons in Healthcare Industry

Beacons can be utilized over the length and breadth of health actions like hospital tracking system,hospital patient tracking . Some of the most useful benefits are generated significant value are as follows:

1.Individuals — The main benefit of beacons has the capability to modify health data according to a patient or healthcare provider’s mobile phone history and existing health information. So personalization allows direct one to one discussions that are extremely relevant and delivered at the right time.

2.Electronic Medical records –If you need patience and physicians relevant information at the right moment, then beacon technology provide relevant information based on Geo-location. For example, when a patient is waiting outside the doctor’s room, the latest medical records can directly be sent to his/her mobile phone, in order to discuss them with the doctor.

In another example, beacons installed near patients’ beds can automatically notify the doctor or other relevant hospital staff about the patient’s specific medical records, directly on their mobile phones, when they visit the patient.

3. Inside navigation systems — Today, many multi-specialty hospitals are used beacons and provide health care facilities to patients, such as indoor maps and navigation of ward rooms, doctor’s office, and emergency room and many more. With the help of beacons can greatly help with patient and doctor for the navigation purpose as well as a tracking system. This can also help in decreasing the costs incurred in installing signage, track boards, and physical maps.

4. Connect with wearable technology — Wearable technology is growing up in the healthcare industry. Wearable technology is a posterity of mobile technology that frequently syncs with devices. The application that connections with the wearable can be equipped with ibeacon technology in order to provide highly related and hyper-local information to users.

5. Improved data and analytics — The biggest benefits of beacon technology are its capability to collect a wealth of information that is related to the patient (this contains locations, feelings, and preferences). This, along with physiological data and usage data can be used to update users about purchases and prescribing references to them.

Final Note:

GoTekT is one of the low-cost tracking product development for various industries. One of the biggest industries is health care where Gotekt tracker is very useful. Gotekt tracker works for hospitals as well as patient tracking with the beacon which gives real-time tracking solution.