In-Shop Experience

With players like Facebook and WhatsApp offering proximity-based campaigns through their iOS and Android platforms, businesses now have the option of combining social campaigns that physically drive clients to your door with proprietary apps that enable a deeper engagement and shopping experience that can trigger physical events, such as a blinking fridge as the customer or client's walks by.

Classroom & Education

The iBeacon platform offers a wide range or applications that can be applied on an educational context. From simple games that require students to move around, explore and find things to more scientific or technical experiments in the classroom, iBeacon is a great tool to stimulate young minds and drive curiosity towards subjects like geography, context, automation, logic and technology. A great source of examples and experience in how Beacons can be applied in classrooms is Jonathan Nalder's JNXYZ/Beacons for Education website.

Zoo App

Imagine a Zoo mobile app, which visitors open once they get into the park. When they are close to selected attractions, the app fires a notification/image/video with information of what is being looked at. It can tell visitors: “Give some peanuts to the monkey now and watch your arm disappear in 1 second”.

Automation

All kinds of automation, be it home, commercial or industrial, are directly related to what beacons can offer. From your garage door that opens once your car stops by (without pressing any button) to lights that go on and off as you need them to be.

Gamification

You can use this to encourage your attendees to explore less popular areas of your trade show by offering them special rewards for discovering strategically placed beacons in those areas.

Sponsorships

You can also leverage beacons for additional revenue by pushing notifications that prompt your users to come and check out the closest booth when they pass by a certain zone at the trade show venue. This can be a premium service offered to sponsors.

Content Delivery

You can allow your attendees to avoid the long taxing wait for a copy of the presentation slides by leveraging beacons to recognize attendees at the session and automatically deliver slides, ebooks etc during or immediately after the session.

Retail

This is where its demand is huge, lot of use cases we can get in this sector.

Tracking

Restaurants have shown us how useful mobile technologies are. Enabled with touch devices, waiters don’t have to rush to the kitchen in order to dispatch orders. In other cases, clients can make orders directly on tablets available at the table. Before iBeacon or NFC technology, those apps require the waiter to select a table number every time he/she takes an order. With iBeacons, the app automatically knows which table the waiter is at. It can display the client name (with eventual dinning/preferences history) and automatically associate orders with tables without requiring waiters to manually select a table number.

Business owners can digest analytics data showing which tables (serving which clients) employees stayed more time/compared to client’s satisfaction, and it is even possible to understand and analyze employees’ most common paths, least visited/shadow areas and improve efficiency. The same concept can be adapted to a myriad of business kinds: from logistics to hotels and hospitals.

Smart Sushi

You've probably seen sushi joints that use conveyor belts to move sushi in front of you. Now, imagine if each of those plates have a small sensor sticked under them. With the restaurant's app opened, hungry customers can see detailed information about what's in front of them, including price, nutrition information, ingredients, origin of the fish and much more. By clicking a 'I got it' button, patrons can also keep track of their current bill without worrying about dish color codes normally used in conveyor belts joints.

Loyalty Programs

NFC technology does not offer the range of possibilities that Bluetooth does and iBeacons can be used to do something very similar to what NFC does. When adjusted to be ranged within very short distances, iBeacons can be deployed to allow communication between stationary beacons and loyalty program apps. In a more advanced scenario, both the app and the stationary sensor can perform passive (listener) and active (broadcaster) actions, allowing short-range, two-way communication between the app and the iBeacon sensor.

Heat mapping

With access to real-time statistics, you can even use beacons to recognize hotspots and send alerts to event managers about locations that are overcrowded and more prone to security breaches.

Social Network

Lot of potential market in this sector as well, people can search for people around them with new faces and know more about them.