There are two ways to approach deploying iBeacon. You can either build a siloed experience (your beacons in your venue interacting with your app) or you can open that network to others, sharing to other apps. In the latter scenario, you maintain the venue and beacons themselves while third parties can lease access to that beacon network to deliver content, which can vary from indoor navigation to real-time contextual advertising.
Open beacon networks will be especially useful in huge locations with a lot of foot traffic generated by diverse group of people. Think airports, shopping malls, or smart cities. And as many projects involving beacons move from pilot stage to major deployment throughout 2015, we will be seeing massive interest in this approach. That’s why today we’re introducing an update to Estimote Cloud: infrastructure sharing. It’s a new feature that enables allowing third party apps access to your beacons in an easy and secure way.
Building the network
Imagine a big airport, that has beacons deployed at every gate and throughout the concourse. Even if you’re a frequent traveler, the chances are slim that you have an app installed for every major airport out there. It’s much more likely that you have the official app of your airline of choice. Let’s call it Air Lemon. Since Air Lemon doesn’t own the airport facilities or the physical venue itself, it’s not in a position to deploy beacons, even though that contextual information would makes its mobile experience far better. Instead, the airport will invest in a beacon network, similar to a wifi network that it opens up as a public utility to both its partner airlines and their passengers. With Estimote Cloud’s infrastructure sharing, the airport can now grant Air Lemon access to a subset of its beacons, making that app smarter and better. For instance, giving it the ability to guide you to the right gate at the exact right moment.
The airport might also be sharing its beacons with Air Blue. Let’s say that instead of indoor navigation, their app automatically pulls out your boarding pass when you approach the gate. That’s why Air Blue only needs access to beacons installed near the gates they’re using. With Estimote Cloud’s infrastructure sharing, this can be managed with just a few clicks. The airport has the flexibility to choose any number of beacons and share them with as many partners as they’d like. Any space can be divided into sections owned by particular apps, or conversely, have all deployed beacons accessible for every collaborating publisher. The sharing configuration is completely flexible.
This creates an enormous number of possibilities. Scavenger hunts, in-store analytics or personalized dynamic pricing are possible mobile applications built on top of beacon networks. It will be fascinating to see how infrastructure sharing accelerates contextual computing in the months and years ahead. What in the past was possible only in the browser can now be achieved in the physical world as well. This means opening up new revenue streams and business models both in mobile and brick-and-mortar spaces. Some of them, like the airport example or a shopping mall with a real-time ad exchange, are obvious. But we’d love to see developers implement this feature in ways we haven’t yet thought of, just like we didn’t expect many of the use cases behind some of the most successful startups leveraging iBeacon. Because the truly amazing thing about building a new technology is seeing how it evolves in the hands of its users.
Cloud is key
Security lays at the foundation of infrastructure sharing. We have written a lot about this previously, and last Fall we released a massive update to all core elements of our platform. It included a security mechanism called Secure UUID that uses Estimote Cloud to encrypt the IDs of your beacons. Secure UUID makes it impossible to piggyback on them. Infrastructure sharing is built on top of this technology. Thanks to that, you can rest assured that only authorized people can see the true UUID, Major, and Minor values of your beacons.
If you want to share beacons, first you need to enable Secure UUID on them (in case you don’t know how to that, we’ve explained it elsewhere). Then simply select the beacons in the Estimote Cloud dashboard and click Share Beacons. All you need to do now is provide the App ID of the application that you want to invite (this article has you covered on that). The owner of this app will see those beacons in the Apps section of Estimote Cloud. Now this app also has the key to resolve Secure UUID. Remember that people you share beacons with will not be granted anything beyond read-only access to the IDs of beacons you selected to lease. They won’t be able to change, or even see any of the settings. Everything stays under your control, and you can also revoke permissions at any time.
After the growth we’ve seen last year, both at Estimote and around the entire iBeacon space, we have no doubt that beacons will be everywhere. And it will be more engaging if more than one app can take an advantage of a beaconified space. Right now there are more than 40,000 mobile developers in our community, building amazing mobile experiences. Now they can run their apps on existing infrastructure, in retail and beyond. We believe it will accelerate mobile innovation and user adoption inside these spaces and create unique monetization opportunities for beacon app developers who collaborate with brands and retailers.
This is just the first release of our infrastructure sharing feature. It’s an extremely important component of Estimote Cloud and in the next couple of months you will see us investing a lot of resources into expanding this technology. In the future we want to add in-depth analytics, even easier integration with Estimote SDK, and of course support for Estimote Stickers, so that the developers of tomorrow will be able to feed their apps not only with micro-location, but also product-level context. But since today is just the first release of this feature, your feedback is crucial: don’t hesitate to tell us how you like it and what aspects we should prioritize. We need your help in shaping the future of beacon networks, so let us know what you think via email and on Twitter, and don’t forget to read more about infrastructure sharing on Estimote Community Portal!