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Apple, Google and other titans from the tech world have once proclaimed beacons – small emitters that interact with smartphones, apparel devices and other gadgets nearby – as the future of retail sale. The consensus of about five years ago was that radio in restaurants, retailers and sports stadiums would allow customers to benefit from highly customized and context-specific promotions within the reach of their wireless signals.
It did not work like that.
This week, Google removed the nearby notifications and decided to remove Eddystone support for Android and Chrome in October 2017. Since the introduction of Eddystone and. Apple iBeacon, adoption of tags among the brick and mortar chains slowed to a trickle. Now, only a few brands – Target, Starbucks and Walmart, to name a few – continue to invest in the tags.
This negative trend stems mainly from platform issues related to security vulnerabilities and poor reception. Technological weaknesses are not to blame, as you will see in our brief history of tag platforms. The truth is that it's a bit more complicated.
Competitive standards
IBeacon
Apple has quietly introduced iBeacon at the 2017 Global Developer Conference in San Francisco, alongside iOS 7. This feature, which had leaked a lot of ink for months before its unveiling, uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to broadcast an identifier to iPads and iPhones at the millisecond address. BLE (formerly marketed as Bluetooth Smart) implements a mesh specification that allows multi-to-many communication via Bluetooth; In other words, BLE devices can exchange information with any number of other people in a network.
iBeacon is able to do more than just trigger push notifications. It supports region monitoring (in up to 20 regions), allowing BLE tags to note when devices enter, expect, and exit a given zone and can use this information to trigger notifications and notifications. alarms. It can also approximate the distance between an iBeacon tag and a target device and classify it into three distinct ranges: immediate or a few centimeters; almost a few meters; and far, more than 10 meters.
Eddystone and the Google tag platform
Google announced a kind of competing platform in 2015: Eddystone, an evolution of its UriBeacon prototype technology. Unlike iBeacon, Eddystone (named after the flagship of Eddystone in the UK) is agnostic in terms of hardware: it works with iOS, Android and any other hardware that can communicate with BLE tags. (EIDs) that change frequently and allow only authorized customers to decode them.
Eddystone is part of Google's open source web project, which aims to create "on-demand interactions" with smart devices. As explained by Scott Jenson, interaction and user interaction designer at Google, on the GitHub page of the project: "People should be able to access any smart device – a distributor automatic, a poster, a toy, a bus stop, a rental car – and not having to download an application first. Everything should be at hand.
BLE tag material
The BLE tags are very energy efficient, as one could expect – some can last up to two years with a single battery. They operate in the 2.4 GHz – 2.4835 GHz spectrum; can reach up to 450 meters; and they are cheap, costing anywhere from $ 5 to $ 50.
BLE tags of all flavors can locate the device. How? Transfer power – the power of the wireless signal measured within one meter of the phone, smartwatch, or target tablet – decreases as distance increases and signal strength reaches exactly one meter from the device is calibrated and hard coded in the tag, BLE tags can compare the two values to calculate an approximate distance.
Android nearby
Along with Eddystone, Google has launched the nearby API for Android and iOS, which combines Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and an inaudible and ultrasonic sound to establish proximity.
The Google Tag Platform, also launched with Eddystone, includes the Proximity Beacon API, which allows developers to attach content to individual tags. Using an "attachments" system, they can associate a semantic location and related data that can be updated in real time and retrieved with an application using the nearby API (via Google Play Services) and the nearby library for iOS.
More tags, more problems
The tags seemed to have taken a promising start five years ago. And about 4 million tags were active at the beginning of this year, against 500,000 in 2015, an increase of nearly 900% in three years.
Sports stadiums were the first adopters. According to the Proxbook 2016 report from market research firm Unacast, 93% of all MLB stadiums in the United States are tagged, as well as 75% of all NFL stages, 53% of all arenas of the NBA and 47% of those of the NHL.
Retailers and restaurants rushed with the same zeal. Macy's department store chain rolled out thousands of tags in more than 800 stores, where they shared information about sales and rewards, Shopkick. Lord & Taylor followed with his SnipSnap coupon app, as did American Eagle and Aerie. McDonald's franchisees in Columbus, Georgia and other countries used it to pass offers to select customers. And Starbucks has announced plans to roll out tags in its high-end coffee tasting and roasting rooms.
There were signs of success from the beginning. In the 2014-2015 season, the San Francisco Golden State Warriors recorded an 87% increase in average dealings, and the Orlando Magic recorded an increase of more than $ 1 million in ticket sales due to his commitment and his messages. The aforementioned McDonald's franchisees have also seen their sales increase. And Macy's has seen its commitment in store multiplied by 16.
But in 2015, only 3% of retailers in the United States had implemented beacon technology and only 16% intended to implement it.
So, what has happened?
Application dependency was (and is) a major obstacle. It's hard to convince customers to download a service they've never used, even with the promise of discounts, especially when you consider that up to 70% have never heard of tags.
Power and range limitations pose an additional challenge. Only about 40% of users in North America report using Bluetooth, and Bluetooth signals are more easily hindered by physical objects than by Wi-Fi. And although they last for years in some cases, the batteries in the tags have a limited life. Deployment requires a lot of planning and testing.
Tags also tend to be spammed. Google cited "a significant increase in the number of locally irrelevant notifications" as being the reason why it decided to discontinue nearby notifications, not without good reason. A recent study showed a 313% drop in the use of shopping apps by customers having received more than one tag notification at the same place.
And then there is the question of privacy. Few in-store apps clearly specify what type of location and behavioral information they collect (information such as tours, unique visitors, new visitors, popular roads, repeat visits, retention, etc.). The same goes for APIs such as Google, Nearby, which have been criticized by privacy advocates for recording and storing audio components of tags.
None of this to suggest that the tags are completely dead. Large retailers such as Walmart, Rite Aid and Target continue to experiment with in – store shopping experiences using BLE tags, and annual tag shipments are expected to reach 565 million units by 2021.
But they are certainly not ready to revolutionize the way we buy, eat and encourage our favorite sports teams – at least not sooner.
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