12/25/2022 0 Comments Radbeacon card![]() You don’t even have to buy anything to play around! Your phone or computer can become a web beacon as well. ![]() Or they can be more powerful and flexibile like Beaconstac’s beacons that are built to work outside and are paired with a monthly subscription cost for managing them. RadBeacon Dot that’s ~$12.00 and speaks both Eddystone and iBeacon. The physical beacons are neat, and like I said, can be affordable. One of the best resources for reading and learning about The Physical Web is Google’s own landing page about it all. Or being at a conference and having the schedule a tap away. It gets me thinking about things like standing outside a restaurant and getting a link to the hours and menu. Let’s look at a video of that first example, as it’s pretty compelling: Be sitting at a bus stop and be sent right to a site tracking the busses that serve that stop.Walk into a hotel and get sent directly to a check in page, so you can skip the normal face-to-face process of checking in.Walk up to a parking meter and get send directly to the place you can pay.The company Beaconstac (who, disclaimer, wants you love this because they sell devices and a platform for it) have a pretty nice roundup of things that are a little closer to life-changing. It’s clever, but it’s more neat than life changing. OK – so Jeremy is near me, I can see whatever URL Jeremy is broadcasting and go there. I guess you could thing of it like a more useful and less visually crufty QR code. ![]() Chrome on both iOS and Android has ways to see them, even being as first-class citizen as being in the notification screens. The way you find these URL’s varies by platform and browser. Part of the beauty of BLE is these little physical web beacons can last years without recharging. It does this over a protocol called Eddystone (Google’s take) or iBeacon (Apple’s take) which both use BLE (“Bluetooth Low Energy”). ![]() The beacon broadcast a URL that any device listening can see, and if they wish, visit. More importantly, what it did was simple and brilliant: Including very small and fairly inexpensive. Was it little credit card sized thing? I can’t remember exactly (he tells me it was somehow related to Mozilla’s Project Magnet), but there are a number of devices in all kinds of shapes and sizes. Of course, Jeremey was way ahead of me, and literally had a web beacon device in his wallet. I had just heard of this idea of “the physical web” and brought it up. I was sitting around in the lobby of a hotel at An Event Apart show with Jeremey Keith one time. ![]()
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