One of Google’s approaches to the Internet of Things involves placing low-energy Bluetooth beacons that can communicate with devices. Google is announcing new partners today who have updated Android apps that can talk to beacons placed in stores, museums, and airports.
Bluetooth beacons usually only broadcast public one-way signals. By allowing secure and private communication with users, the Eddystone-EID opens up a variety of new use cases for beacons. Along with the new secure open beacon format, Google is announcing a number of new hardware partners that will make compatible devices.
Chrome 49 for Android, which introduces improved background sync, new APIs, notifications for nearby smart beacons, and more, is today available to all users through Google’s public, stable release channel.
A part of Google’s Internet of Things approach involves placing low-energy Bluetooth beacons in the world that can communicate with smartphones. Starting with version 49, currently in beta, Chrome for Android will be able to read and interact with these beacons. Google has also announced a research pilot that provides gear to university researchers working on IoT.
Fortune reports that Google has abandoned plans to beam location-based retail messages to both Android and iOS smartphones, shortly before launch. The project was reportedly named Google Here, and would have used beacons in retail stores like Starbucks to display offers and reward cards on the lockscreens of smartphones when they entered the store.
Google Here worked by sending a notification to a smartphone user’s lock screen within five seconds of their entering a partner’s location. If the user clicked on the notification, a full screen HTLM5 “app” experience would launch. Google Here would know when to send the notification via Google Maps and beacons placed in the stores of participating partners …
The Physical Web is an open source web specification from Google released last year with the aim to make interacting with smart devices in the real world as easy as clicking a link, just as we do on the web. Now with the company having released its Eddystone beacon technology and APIs for making this communication between devices in the same proximity easier, it’s integrating Physical Web directly into Chrome for iOS.