Apple launched its iBeacons to great fanfare back in 2013, but since then… well, they haven’t exactly taken the retail world by storm.
An interesting new article by Bloomberg digs into some of the facts and figures about Apple’s beacon technology, citing reports claiming that only 3 percent of retailers currently use beacons, and just 16 percent have plans to use them in the future.
Of these, Apple Stores are said to account for 15 percent of existing beacons — meaning that the technology Apple viewed as a game changer for retailers hasn’t caught on in quite the way the company thought it would.
Smartly, the article claims that iBeacons may have fallen prey to the downside of being an Apple innovation: namely that Apple hype means everyone expects it to take over the world from day one.
“They’re not ubiquitous yet, but they will be ubiquitous in a couple of years,” says Todd DiPaola, CEO of the startup InMarket.
Steve Cheney, co-founder of Estimote, meanwhile notes that, “People — associating it with Apple — expected it to work out of the box, so to speak,” and claims that, “[Adoption] is happening at about the pace we expected.”
Back in mid-2014, a report from ABI Research suggested that 60 million beacons would be used within the next few years, transforming everything from retail and hospital management, to smart homes and personal device tracking.
Personally, I think smart homes have the opportunity to really make use of iBeacons. But that is another area Apple isn’t experiencing as much rapid success as perhaps some originally hoped.
Do you regularly use beacon technology (whether Apple’s or that of a third party)? Leave your comments below.
Source: Bloomberg
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
14 responses to “Two years on, iBeacons still haven’t taken off”
This is literally the first time I’ve ever heard about iBeacons.
You’ve never walked into Walgreens and it knows you’re there? Or go to any major league (or my minor league Lehigh Valkey Iron Pigs) and the technology is amazing.
I work in retail and we are looking into deploying them in 1800 shops in the new year.
I’m looking into a way I can add these to a manufacturing facility
What the hell is an iBeacon?
It is a small Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) radio circuit typically powered by a small coin cell battery. It only sits around transmitting an identity signal similar to how a Wifi access point do. That´s the only thing it does and explains how a small coin cell can last some 6-12 months powering it. They are often seen in shopping malls enclosed in small cases and mounted on walls but the installation can vary a lot. Modern mobile phones with Bluetooth 4.0 built has APIs that an app running on a phone can use to pickup that identity signal. When you move about with your phone the app periodically scans for bluetooth id´s and when it picks up one that matches a set of IDs it is looking for it can take more detailed action such as notifying the user about position, commercial offerings and similar. The particular use case determines what the app is programmed to do, I know a guy who install them in rental cars so that when his personell enters the car (with the ibeacon empowered company app running on a phone in their pocket) he gets an automatic registration of that the staff has been attending to that particular rental car.
MMMMmmmmm iBacon.
I was interested in the technology (from the consumer side) but looking it up last year there was barely any mention of them, much less what it would take to implement them. I kind of like being pinged at Walgreens but that is the only retail place I’ve seen it used and it doesn’t alert me to anything half the times I stop in.
I seriously forgot these things existed
Is there a way to know if your comments have been deleted?
Well that was random…
Anyway just look on your profile page and if you see a red-ish pink badge above the comment that’s says “Comment removed” then it has been deleted (the comment should also be a light shade of gray).
Another way of checking is to go to the original thread that you believe your comment was deleted on, and if somebody had replied to your comment before it was deleted, in place of your comment it should say “This comment was deleted”
Some particularly megalomanic shopping centras being built in some european cities have planned for and implemented iBeacons on large scale. They may not always be the Apple specific protocol variant but the inflow of the low cost chinese beacons are often adopted. Not always primarily for navigating to a shelf of rebated socks in a clothes store but I think generally for indoor positioning / navigation there is a huge uptake in new construction of shopping malls. Such a facility typically has mobil apps guiding the visitor around the vast indoor space overwhelmingly brimming of all things cool to purchase and cafés to visit. And there beacons are used in triangulating fashion to determine the user´s position. But I do not yet see them used much in public transport which is one of the major application areas from my point of view. For example used in subway hall rail entrances they can aid apps in knowing what station you´re approaching and are on and help guidance. Many use cases in health and elderly care. Beacons can not just sit stationary but roles can be switched so that the beacon is on moving objects such as pedestrians and vehicles and detected when passing a particular location.
I use it everyday at home to control lights around the house as I enter or exit room.
It’s going to be slow right until it catches on like wildfire. It’s already been pointed out that there are already a s___ ton of iBeacons being used in retail with the market expected to take off in the next two years. The home automation market is still fragmented as hell with a tiny handful of HomeKit compatible devices available and everything else being a hodgepodge of competing or soon to be outdated standards and price points.
I really want to automate my home and already have several devices -Tile, Automatic, August- that work well but each require the use of separate apps. That’s a tiny fraction of what I’d like to automate but I’m done with the separate apps thing. When siri enabled home kit devices are available at reasonable price points or some reasonable facsimile, I’ll plunge back in, but until then I’m sitting on the sidelines waiting for the market to mature.
I’m not the only one. It DOESN’T mean there isn’t a market.