Google wants to help stores speak to your smartphone, as Apple

Google wants to help stores speak to your smartphone, as Apple ,

Bluetooth beacons are small gadgets that can broadcast location information on your phone more - you guessed it - Bluetooth. They have long been at the heart of intoxicating promises (or threats) we have heard of the Internet of Things: A subway can tell when the next train is coming! A retail store can alert you to an agreement on these shoes you try on! You can finally get the mapping work in the basement of the mall! But for various reasons, they are not spread as quickly as their proponents hoped.

To date, the largest implementation of these tags was IBeacon Apple technology, but now Google is entering the fray in a more serious manner with an open standard it calls Eddystone (after the lighthouse, you see). Eddystone is technically not supposed just a Google project, however, that the company is in full supply many of the characteristics and necessary elements that constitute a beacon ecosystem.

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Eddystone has many moving parts

Ars Technica talked with the engineers behind the project to Google and have good technical breakdown of Eddystone platform. It differs from IBeacon working with Android and iOS, but it also seems to be more technically capable also: it can send URLs that can work with any application or just a web browser, for example, and make it easier for the company that deploy to manage their fleet of gadgets. Eddystone also enables tags that can change their unique identifiers, which could make them more safe to put in your suitcase.

Beyond the technical issues, there may be another reason that Bluetooth beacons are not spread so widely that they could have: privacy. It is possible that the applications that communicate the tags could call home with the location data stored in the tag - if Macy could understand exactly how you walk in the store. Last year BuzzFeed found that 500 tags were installed in New York City telephone booths, which have proven to have been installed to send offers related to the Tribeca Film Festival, but nevertheless were a discovery disconcerting.

Whether or not Eddystone no moves of these concerns in the right direction is obviously an open question, but it is interesting to note again that Google intends either an open-source, vast ecosystem - not just a way for Google to find another way to fit into your digital life. Instead of talking about the ads, the company says it intends to use tags to send non-interruptive notifications Google now so that it can display relevant information based on your location, "as showing you menu items when you are in a restaurant. " We will not know if the Eddystone tags can supplant iBeacons anytime soon, much less make Bluetooth tags like common Wi-Fi hotspots -. But it's a good bet they will not be visible in an Apple store anytime soon