Wednesday, November 11, 2015
Google's Beacon VS Apple's iBeacon !!
Google has introduced a number of new products around Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons in an effort to challenge Apple’s iBeacon ecosystem.
These new products include a new open beacon format, tools and APIs for building apps and services on top of beacons, and a new developer-centric service for managing and monitoring large beacon deployments.
Google has long been interested in Bluetooth beacons. For example, Google’s Nearby project which is also launching as an API . While Nearby also uses other signals (WiFi, audio, etc.), BLE beacons are clearly at the center of Google’s efforts.
The first of Google’s new beacon products is the Eddystone format. The company is releasing the new format under the Apache 2.0 open source license on Github. The new format is meant to give developers a more robust and extensible way for working with beacons, as Google product manager Matthew Kulick told.
Google has already worked with beacon hardware vendors like Bluvision, Estimote,Kontakt.io, Radius Networks and Signal360ato build the Eddystone format into their devices. The new format is completely platform agnostic and any existing beacon can be made Eddystone-compatible with a firmware update.
Google is also launching two new APIs for developers who want to use beacons for their apps. The Nearby API for Android and iOS now makes it easier for apps to find and communicate with devices and beacons that are well nearby. The Proximity Beacon API then takes this a step further and helps developers associate a location and related data with beacons. That data is stored on Google’s servers.
Google also launched a new tool for beacon fleet management.
“We want to make it easier to move from piloting your beacon-assisted apps to getting to scale,” Kulick said.
This new service sits on top of Google’s Eddystone telemetry framework and developers can then take this data and build their own services and dashboards on top of the data they get from this. But for now, Google won’t offer it’s own dashboard. Also the company has no plans to charge for this service.
Google’s own products, will also make use of this new technology. Google Now will also be able to use this service to bring up contextual information, for example, when you are in a restaurant, you will be able to see the menu in Google Now
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment