Apple Releases iBeacon Specification

http://beekn.net/2014/02/apple-releases-ibeacon-specification/

by uptown • 12 years ago

86 65 12 years ago

bdfh42• 12 years ago

A lot of players (including Apple now it seems) trying to make money on top of a standard. there is no IP to be traded in Bluetooth LE itself.

Device suppliers are trying to lock purchasers into particular brands.

Apple presumable are offering the facility of automatic recognition and filtering of specific devices to fire and pass data to iOS apps.

What we (as developers) need is an open standard for encryption and recognition so that we can work with multiple suppliers to meet the needs of our end users.

mpclark2• 12 years ago

The way it has turned out is sort of the other way around. Nearly the entire press corps refers to BLE beacons as "iBeacons", so there is some value to hardware manufacturers in being able to market their product under that name.

mcintyre19942• 12 years ago

It's unfortunate though because Samsung will obviously never market a feature of iBeacons.

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

Is iBeacon used for anything other than to push ads to your phone as soon as you enter a store?

ambirex• 12 years ago

That seems to be the current push, but off the top of my head I could see museums use them for exhibits, airports for communication back to the airline on where you are in the airport (ie, you should head to the gate now, or your gate has changed).

jensC• 12 years ago

I think you can use it for indoor navigation were GPS is useless. However I am not sure of this.

nicholassmith• 12 years ago

In theory it'll be much more accurate for indoor navigation than GPS, as the accuracy level should be higher (as long as there's no RF interference etc etc).

kjell• 12 years ago

I'm using an 'iBeacon' (raspberry pi) in a museum setting to nudge visitors entering a certain gallery: "if you'd like to take our Matisse audio tour…" They slide that notification and iOS opens our app directly to the audio tour.

Here's a much richer interactive tour: http://blog.estimote.com/post/77385955199/estimote-beacons-a...

olefoo3• 12 years ago

With two or more beacons in range you can triangulate for an accuracy within centimeters. It's a key enabling technology for Augmented Reality. It's also how you're going to talk to ambient environmental controls and retrofit older buildings with situational awareness (thalience) that allows them to be responsive to the needs of humans passing through.

untog2• 12 years ago

Do you have any examples of this? I was excited for this use but everything I can see suggests that it is highly inaccurate:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20332856/triangulate-exa...

msoad2• 12 years ago

iBeacon doesn't give you anything useful for triangulation. Sorry. A closer beacon can give you worse signal than the one which is far. That's the nature of Blutooth.

MBCook• 12 years ago

Yes. For example a recent update to Automatic [1] included iBeacon support. It is supposed to make the connection between the phone and the Automatic it's self more reliable when you get into your car.

They've actually said they are the largest iBeacon deployment at the moment since they turned that feature on.

[1] http://www.automatic.com

SigmundA• 12 years ago

Two-Factor auth?

josephpmay• 12 years ago

At a recent hackaton, my team created an app for using iBeacon for employee tracking: http://tracktimeapp.com/

comex• 12 years ago

I want to see it used to provide an interactive map of a large store, with the ability to search for products and see where the relevant shelf is compared to your current location.

I don't know if anyone is doing this, but the technology seems accurate enough.

rada• 12 years ago

I did a trial project with the goal of walking around a lab having readings appear for each piece of equipment as you approach it. Proximity detection was terrible... as it is, I don't think it's useful for anything but very gross distance estimations. Walking into a store will likely work but even then, the distance between stores would have to be pretty significant (or else other stores are presumed to not operate the same beacons).

colinbartlett• 12 years ago

Site is loading very slow for me, so here's the text: http://pastebin.com/2WisUL8z

JetSpiegel• 12 years ago

Still waiting for the superior iBacon.

pavlov• 12 years ago

I'm waiting for iFrancisBacon, the photo-sharing app that turns your selfies into wall-sized nightmarish canvases of melting paint and distorted limbs.

FireBeyond4• 12 years ago

Regardless of the fact that you, and I, realize that two separate teams are working on these things, it looks really bad (well, at least to me) to have your flagship OS vulnerable to an amazingly easy to exploit security hole for multiple days, widely and loudly publicized ...

And nothing comes out. Oh, except this, a specification for pushing ads on you based on your location.

cantfindmypass• 12 years ago

Apple has had a working gotofail fix for OS X internally for days.

FireBeyond4• 12 years ago

Disagree - down vote? Give me a good reason why it’s not bad PR to not hold off on posting about iBeacon and better ways to serve us ads while there’s a glaring hole your only comment on is “coming soon..."

rimantas• 12 years ago

If you missed it there is OS X update. You also probably missed a good book, check out „Mystical man month" by Fred Brooks.

swamp402• 12 years ago

I gave up trying to register as an iBeacon developer after Apple pushed me to a $49 Coface credit rating service.

You can't even SEE the specification without spending $49? Come on.

I'm assuming the credit check is so that you can have the privilege of paying Apple a royalty for every device you stamp "iBeacon" on.

cromwellian2• 12 years ago

I wish the media would stop calling BLE "iBeacon". It's like the media started calling WiFi "Airport". First of all, it gives the mistaken impression that Apple invented or controls BLE which is am industry spec. Secondly, one would have to fear that sooner or later, some proprietary extension makes iBeacons incompatible with BLE to lock them in to Apple devices. This seems more likely if consumers are trained to look for "iBeacon compatible" rather than "BLE compatible"

blumkvist• 12 years ago

Just watch, take notes and learn how to do brand positioning.

goldenkey• 12 years ago

I think you mean posturing.

matthewmacleod• 12 years ago

I would suggest than that other industry participants need to come up with better popular names for technologies. Bluetooth is a total clusterfuck from that perspective.

FWIW I've never heard anybody use the term "Airport" when they meant "Wifi".

cromwellian2• 12 years ago

I didn't say people refer to Wifi as "Airport", I said calling BLE "iBeacon" is like calling Wifi "Airport". That is, calling an IEEE spec by a proprietary trademark.

Yes, BLE needs a better name. Still doesn't change the fact that the media almost completely ignore what iBeacon is. I see lots of articles that fail to even mention that it is BLE.

msoad2• 12 years ago

iBeacon is a standard on top of Bluetooth. It's like saying Airplay is pretty much WiFi but Apple is trying to market it as Airplay. Same as Google Cast protocol on top of WiFi or Spotify Connect on top of WiFi.

jonhohle• 12 years ago

FireWire™ vs. i.LINK™ vs. IEEE-1394

miahi• 12 years ago

It's like everybody calling any application "app" because Apple did so.

gress6• 12 years ago

The media is not calling BLE iBeacon. iBeacon is an application of BLE, which is designed by Apple and is controlled by Apple because it it a feature of iOS.

guelo• 12 years ago

We already know what Apple's iBeacon BLE advertising packet looks like without having to sign away your first-born to read the spec. Here it is:

  ff 4c 00 02 15  # Apple's fixed iBeacon advertising prefix
  <Your 16 byte iBeacon proximity uuid>
  00 00 # major 
  00 00 # minor 
  c5 # The 2's complement of the calibrated Tx Power

Anybody can build such a BLE device and market it as "Compatible with iPhone". The question is if Apple will try to to go full-asshole and claim copyright of that packet structure or something ridiculous like that.

bryanpaluch• 12 years ago

Apple doesn't have to claim copyright.

They can simply make sure your iBeacon proximity uuid doesn't get registered with the OS if you aren't a certified vendor.

No uuid registration with the OS and people using your app will not get a background notification for your iBeacons.

This would leave app developers with only having the ability to detect beacons when their app is foreground, or during background processing time.

Note: There are no checks like this today. You can advertise any UUID you want, and have your app subscribe for notifications if the os detects the iBeacon in the background.

loceng3• 12 years ago

Unfortunately it's likely they will go "full asshole" as Apple is a controlled ecosystem.

gress6• 12 years ago

If you don't tell us why you think it would be in their interest to do so, your comment is meaningless.

nathancahill• 12 years ago

The first two characters of the fixed prefix are "ÿL", most likely referencing YL Ventures [0], an investor in Upstream Commerce (a real-time intelligence startup).

[0] http://www.ylventures.com/

HL3Confirmed• 12 years ago

FF4C0002150 in Binary? 11111111010011000000000000000010000101010000

Number of 1s in that? 15

Number of spaces in the fixed iBeacon prefix? 5

15 / 5?

HL3 Confirmed.

That's what you sound like.

corresation• 12 years ago

They can patent the specifics of the exchange, similar to how ActiveSync (the web services API that Exchange uses) is patented.

MichaelGG• 12 years ago

What stops someone from just spamming popular beacons? Or is there a full authenticated handshake?

mcintyre19942• 12 years ago

If I'm understanding this correctly, it looks like a smart move by Apple that will suck for anyone who doesn't want an iDevice? Are they just trying to market BLE as iBeacon so consumers use it, even though it's clearly never going to be marketed under that name by any other OEM? They've essentially found a way to make companies pay to call their BLE iBeacon, paying for Apple to break the market and make everyone else think BLE is iOS only?

newman314• 12 years ago

What I find interesting is that there has been very little talk about privacy concerns over iBeacon.

I wonder why that's the case?

notatoad• 12 years ago

What are the privacy concerns? as far as i know, it's a broadcast-only mechanism - your device doesn't respond to a beacon, if you don't want to broadcast anything don't set up an iBeacon.

a-priori• 12 years ago

This is exactly it: a beacon just announces itself and provides its ID. It's up to an app on the receiving device to listen for the beacons it cares about and react to them.

The beacon has no way of knowing which devices are listening or are in range of the beacon so there's no privacy issues I can think of.

arthurcolle• 12 years ago

Is this NFC for Apple?

skrowl• 12 years ago

HOPEFULLY NFC beats this, but who knows.

gress6• 12 years ago

NFC cannot do what iBeacons do, therefore it cannot beat iBeacon whatever that would mean.

tylerco• 12 years ago

This news sounds fake to me, based merely on a screenshot. This "iBeacon program" mention of this page is not new.

Apple Releases iBeacon Specification

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