Beacon Powered Solutions:

The Ultimate Road Map

A free guide into the world
of proximity know-hows.

Contents
1. Introduction ________________________ 2
2. Beacon powered solutions_______________ 3
2.1 Inform__________________________ 3
2.2 Sell ___________________________ 4
2.3 Interact________________________ 5
2.4 Navigate________________________ 6
2.5 Analyze________________________ 7
2.6 Track__________________________ 8
2.7 Secure_________________________ 9
3. Conclusion ________________________ 10

Why should I care?

Virtual life entrenched in our everyday activities. We spend so much time with our
smartphones, tablets and notebooks not only because its fun. Its also very convenient.
And addictive.
Nowadays people want services to be the same: easy to use and at their fingertips.
If your business is people-oriented, sooner or later it will have to adapt in order to be
where your customers are: in their smartphones!
So what kind of solutions for offline enterprises are out there?
Truth is, there are many.
But there are only two important features any successful solution should have. First, it has
to represent a technology that will link you with your customers via their smart devices
(because thats where they are spending most of their free time). Second, it should be
something that will connect your offline services or products to the online domain.

Got it! So why should I consider beacons?

One of the innovative technologies that combine both of these features is the beacon.
Using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) it broadcasts a signal to all smart devices in its range.
This signal triggers a customized event in your customers app that can be related to a
specific item or a location he / she is next to at this exact moment.
In comparison with other solutions, which can secure a similar result, beacons are much
cheaper and easier to use, maintain, and install.
Besides, the number of ways they can be used is almost limitless! So why not give it a try?

OK, theres already a lot of information on beacons online.

Why should I read this paper?
Searching for the right proximity-based solution for your enterprise can turn into an
exhausting task.
This is why we prepared it for you. After researching over 100 use cases we categorized
them into several solution-based pillars that cut through different industries.
If you are wondering how beacons can provide a solution specifically for your business,
this paper is for you.
To help you navigate, at the beginning of each chapter we have included a short summary
of the possible business needs and solutions that beacons can provide in order to
accommodate them. So just scroll through until you find a point that resonates with you,

Introduction

and learn about it in detail in the section below.

Keep in mind that you dont have to follow just one specific path! In fact, the majority of
companies use a combination of several beacon-powered solutions, tailored to suit their
business objectives.

Fine, Im sold. Lets give it a try!

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What can I use beacons for?

Inform

If you are looking to:

You can use beacons to:

Attract people to your venue

product or a company with people

Raise awareness about your product

or company
Engage people with your product

Share useful information about your

passing by
Send agenda of your event or

Share information with your clients at

a restaurant menu directly to

the touch of a button

customers nearby

Save money on printing costs by

transmitting information digitally
Reward visitors with exclusive and
free access to VIP information
Improve customer experience by
sending greeting messages as
people enter the venue

Is this something that interests you? Find out more below! Or scroll down to check the
next solution.
Sharing information related to a specific place or object is one of the most popular and

Beacon
powered solutions

simple beacon functionalities.

If you are looking for a knowledge-building, information-sharing or customer-attracting
solution, this is an option for you.
Share various information with your customers such as:

event agendas, brochures or schedules as people enter the venue or approach your
stand at the exhibition;
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menu suggestions as they pass by your restaurant;

description of products that you are selling at your store;
or just a simple greeting when a customer enters your store.

Retain your customers

Enable contactless payments
Decrease time your customers stand
in line

You can even reward your audience with access to otherwise chargeable information.

Transmit messages on sales and

discounts next to relevant products
Give loyalty points for each purchase
or check-in at the venue
Enable customers to proceed

Shinjusha Video Journal used this approach of granting free access to VIP content in order

payments triggered by beacons by

to attract visitors to their booth by during Tokyo-based video fair.

integrating them with your Point of

Sales
Is this something that interests you? Find out more below! Or scroll down to check the
Noboru Tateishi,

Its been a real success because weve noted the

President of
Shinjusha Co.,
Ltd., Video Journal
publisher

biggest sales made during this fair for several years.

People were curious, they were asking questions. That
lead to building relationships

next solution.
Information sharing goes hand in hand with commercial messaging. The difference
between two solutions is very simple: one is used to inform, the other to sell.
If you are a retailer, you probably invest a lot of effort into raising your customers
awareness of sales, discounts, deals, coupons or loyalty points.
Beacons will help you achieve these actions more efficiently. By adding hyperlocal and
customized context to your marketing messages that are delivered directly to customers

Sharing information not only helps you to attract revenue - it can also save you money. For

smartphones you will be able to attract more new customers and engage better with

example, TEDx Conference in Padova (Italy) reduced spendings on printing costs by 45%

existing ones.

using beacon triggered messages instead of leaflets for their Innovation Hall exhibition. Not
to mention the positive impact on the environment!

This feature is already highly popular in large malls and leisure centers such as Vulcano
Buono in Italy, where boutiques can send out coupons and information about sales to
people passing by. Ebizu, a Malaysian business solutions provider, among other functions
enables a hands-free check-in that helps visitors of shopping centers to seamlessly collect
loyalty points.

Sell

Users may connect with many of their favourite brands

Rohit

at different places through just one application. They

Maheswaran,

know that wherever they go, Ebizu enhances their

Co-Founder and
CPO of Ebizu Sdn
Bhd.

experiences and delivers personalized offers that

they wouldnt get otherwise

If you are looking to:

Boost your product sales

You can use beacons to:

Moreover, thanks to the shared access feature of Kontakt.io beacons it became possible
for Ebizu to capitalize on their beacon network by giving access to other proximity solution

Drive people to your venue as they

providers or app developers.

Raise awareness about ongoing

pass by through location sensitive

As you can see, there are many ways beacons can help your business to grow.

promotions and discounts

notifications

And its not only limited to retail: museums, universities, cinemas, and even zoos are using
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beacons to sell. For example, Italian zoo called Zoom Torino is planning use beacons to

offer different special promotions to visitors in their leisure zones and restaurants based
on the weather conditions outside (two ice-creams for the price of one during summer or a
free hot tea with a meal on a rainy day).

Streamline ordering, ticketing, and

proximity-aware quizzes and treasure

booking processes

hunts

Help visitors to socialize and

enabling users to share their

exchange information

Finally, it is possible to integrate beacons with your Point of Sale (POS) to enable customers

to purchases with a single touch in their smartphone app. If you are receiving information
about products, offers, and loyalty points through your app, the natural last step is to pay
for goods or services using the same tool - your smartphone.

For example, a beacon-enabled mobile app of a Swiss watchmaker company Franck Muller

not only gives a customer an opportunity to select the dimensions, materials, and color of

Link proximity with social media

experience while theyre on site
Integrate a proximity based ordering
feature in your app
Enable booking of venues, transport
and goods, on the spot
Help visitors to register with their
smartphones so they dont have to

the watch but also to place an order and to pay for it.

stand in line
Enable exchange of contact
information through proximity app at
your event

Interact

Is this something that interests you? Find out more below! Or scroll down to check the
next solution.
This type of solution is widely used for educational purposes. It is very popular with
museums, exhibitions, universities or zoos. Depending on your app, beacons can trigger
text, photo, video or audio information about what your visitors are observing right now.
Beacons can also make your objects talk making visitors experience more personal and
interactive.
Using multiple beacons you can create not just specific interactive objects, but entire
interactive spaces, where people will be constantly engaged wherever they go.

If you are looking to:

You can use beacons to:

Make your visitors experience more

to help international students. As students walk by a beacon, it triggers information in the

Develop apps that will help your

Universitys app about where they are, what they can do there, or how to get to another

personal, customized, and engaging

visitors learn more about exhibits

place. For example, if a student is staying next to a deans office, he can effortlessly

Educate visitors about the space they

that theyre standing in front of

discover which forms or applications can be completed there.

are in and the objects they are facing

Attract attention and raise awareness

Make objects alive and enable them

to talk with visitors
Connect visitors with the experts who

It is the proximity-aware content that makes the app

Liliana Lato,

are usually neglected

will answer their questions about the

useful for our students. I am sure it will also contribute

Motivate users to visit more places at

venue and exhibits

to promoting the university and our city among

Save money on external audio guides

international students in the future.

Head of the
International
Relations Office
of the University
of Lodz

about the parts of your venue that

For example, University of Lodz (Poland) beconized all of their 38 buildings and dormitories

your venue
Enable users to interact with your
product or service

by enabling them in a mobile app

Gamify users experience with

When it comes to building proximity-based interactions with your users, skys the limit:

you can create quizzes and treasure hunts around your interactive objects, rewarding
users with points, just like one festival did in Romania;
you can connect visitors with the experts who will answer live questions about an
event, venue or exhibits just like in Brooklyn Museum;
following the example of the eFan24 platform that operates on stadiums, you can link

Enable visitors easily to find a

specific point / room / object in a

venue
Make indoors navigation accurate,
directed, and real-time
changing spaces like exhibition halls

while theyre on site;

or markets, where booths constantly

of contact information at an event via proximity app: attendees by simply wave their

smartphones next to the exhibition stand.

The interactions that take place via beacon enabled mobile applications can be more than
just fun and educative - they can also help your customers and visitors to reduce time

Adjust navigation to dynamically

your proximity solutions with social media, enabling users to share their experience
finally, similarly to ACE of M.I.C.E Exhibition in Turkey, you can enable the exchange

change their location and ownership

Attract people to cities, landmarks, or

Introduce path and time estimation

features
Link navigation with the real-time or
offline schedule of your event
Enable beacon guided tours, which
will be available exclusively through

in-app purchase or subscription

Add environmental information for
visually impaired people
Integrate beacon and GPS navigation

historical sites through context-rich

for outdoors / indoors spaces such as

navigation solutions

universities, fairs or concerts

Help visually impaired people

navigate your venue

spent booking or ordering (and ultimately queueing) in restaurants or events hosting a

large number of people.

Is this something that interests you? Find out more below! Or scroll down to check the

For example, Auto Ganza, an official Volkswagen dealer in Moscow, deployed beacons at

next solution.

its showroom to help visitors schedule a test drive. An app called Orderella that is used by
the restaurants and bars in UK limits queues by enabling customers to order meals via their

So far weve talked about beacon solutions that help you to inform. But what about

smartphones. Let your phone do the queueing - this is their motto.

helping to navigate? Isnt this is what proximity is all about?

You are totally right! In fact, the capacity to do both navigation and informing at the same
time is what makes beacon technology so handy!

Navigate

For example, you can link beacon-enabled navigation features in your app with the realtime or offline schedules. This becomes particularly useful at concerts, universities or
airports. In fact, the KLM Royal Dutch Airlines already implemented such solution at the
Amsterdam Schiphol Airport. Transfer passengers using the beacon supported app can
easily find the path to their next gate and estimate the time they need to get there.
Watch how it happens from an end-user perspective.

If you are looking to:

You can use beacons to:

Support visitors navigation in

Implement an indoor navigation app

tortuous venues and huge open

that will work similarly to GPS for the

spaces

end user
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Weve all experienced how GPS navigation starts to act all crazy the moment we enter the
building. Well, beacons help to bridge this gap.

Analyze

The beacon powered app using triangulation can detect the exact position of every
Bluetooth device in the venue. For the end-users, it will work similarly to GPS, but with
higher energy efficiency. Alternatively, you can build your app basing the navigation
feature on visitors approximate location. In this case, it will work similarly to those you are
here maps in shopping centers.
This can become a lifesaver if your venue is big and tortuous, with many different rooms
and turnings. It can also help visitors to fully discover your space! For example, the Bristol
Museum and Art Gallery introduced an app called The Hidden Museum that encourages
visitors to discover parts of the museum they would not normally see, such as seldom
visited galleries, collections not currently on display and behind-the-scenes stories.
It might sound like we are setting beacons against GPS. Thats not true! They can and
should work together. Take the example of Blind Square, who developed a solution to

If you are looking to:

You can use beacons to:

help visually impaired people navigate at Penn State University in U.S. It uses beacons
for navigation inside the campus buildings and switches to GPS when you exit outside.
Beacons make the app context-rich by giving you information about the location,

With beacons navigation feature you can make guides for cities, museums or landmarks

the opportunity to explore sites having only a smartphone in their hand.

Not to mention that beacon-enabled navigation is very easy to adjust. If you are setting
navigation in spaces similar to exhibition halls, where names and places of the booths

statistics and draw time and space

those spaces

sensitive heat maps

Learn about the pathway and

employees
Improve crowd management
Learn how much time people spend
next to a specific object or in a

even more interesting, context-rich, and interactive, giving tourist from all over the world

Use beacons to gather aggregated

footfall and how users interact with

movement patterns of your users or

direction, and surrounding environment: rooms and buildings you are passing, doors and
stairs in front of you, upcoming changes of the walking surface and so on.

Learn which spots get the most

Identify best places to exhibit your

best offers
Improve your sales by learning who
your repeat customers are
Identify peak times at your venue
Improve security, cleanliness of the

certain room / part of the building

facility, and the working schedule of

Enable automatic check-ins at your

your employees

office

change constantly, beacons are your number one choice!

Is this something that interests you? Find out more below! Or scroll down to check the
next solution.
Because of their location-based nature beacons can provide detailed analytical insights on
the movement behavior of your visitors and customers.
Its not stalking, its a research!
This data has proved to be extremely valuable for many businesses as it helps them to
learn how visitors interact with their venue in space and time. You can see which areas are
the most and least popular, what is the progression of visitors travel, how much time on
average people spend in the exact location or where they are at a given time.
What you will do with this information later depends entirely on your needs. Many use it to
8

improve customers journey through their shops or boost sales by re-arranging the space
according to the most popular areas. This approach was used by the Carrefour chain in
Tunisia. It helped to improve what the store offers and understand where its possible to

Keep tabs on important public

Locate your personal goods and
valuables

further increase profitability or build customer loyalty.

and crowded and which are skipped.

Quickly find defibrillators or other

other critical medical equipment in

your hospital
Find your notebook and never lose it
again in your office or dormitory

Others, like Groningen Museum in Netherlands, draw heatmaps of their venues based on
aggregated visitors behavior data in order to figure out which areas are the most popular

objects that change position

Is this something that interests you? Find out more below! Or scroll down to check the
next solution.

That [data] provides museums with detailed information

Sietze de Jong ,

about their physical infrastructure and how visitors

CEO & Cofounder of Tapme

Media

interact with it. With beacons and proximity, such

knowledge is finally available and affordable.

But wait, theres more! Beacons can not only be used to track smartphones. They can
become tracking devices themselves.
Lets imagine that you have a warehouse with hundreds of containers that are constantly
on the move for loading or unloading. It can be difficult to find a specific one at short
notice. Mounting beacons can help you to establish a monitoring system for keeping track
and locating every single one of them.

If you are organizing a big concert or a festival, visitors behavior data can be crucial for
crowd management. It can also help to find out which stage was the most visited or who

This applies not only to stocks and stones but also to animals. Just look at theses cute
alpacas with Kontakt.io Tough Beacons!

was the most popular artist (by combining data on the most visited location with the
specific time slot). The German Reeperbahn Festival, for example, used data collected
through beacons to better design their next events.

While we didnt envision attaching a beacon to an

Szymon

Alternatively, you can use beacons to track your employees movements during the day or

alpaca when we designed the Tough Beacon, we think

Niemczura ,

its a great and surprisingly adorable showcase of

CEO at Kontakt.io

establish a system of check-ins. This can significantly improve the quality of some specific

how durable they are in the real world.

services such as cleaning, which can be crucial for hygiene standards at various production
sites, in hospitals or swimming pools.

Although in this example beacons are used for entertainment and educational purposes,

Track

you can imagine how they might become handy on farms where you need to monitor your
stock.
You can install beacons on vehicles like cars or bikes with apps such as Blueanker that
informs the user that the vehicle is moving when he / she is not around. Chances are this
is because someone attempts to steal it! The notification helps users to react quickly and
also locate the stolen vehicle if its in the range of a beacon signal.

If you are looking to:

You can use beacons to:

Track your tools, transport,

commodities, and stock

Locate goods in a warehouse or

livestock on a farm

You might think that beacons look too fragile to last through constant vibrations from
movement an d harsh environmental conditions. Dont let the appearance fool you! For
example, Kontakt.ios Tough Beacon is built specifically to be always on the move and
survive in Bear Grylls-style conditions.
9

Moreover, beacons not only survive harsh conditions themselves: they can also save others!

Finally, beacons can provide cheap, but efficient security solutions.

Finding a right drug or a piece of equipment on time might become a matter of life and

They can be integrated with electronic locks to secure doors in your office, household or a

death. Beacons mounted on defibrillators or other critical medical equipment in the

venue. There is no need to carry around a bunch of keys anymore. Your smartphone is the

hospital can help to locate them with one click.

only one youll need!

Finally, if you are simply losing your personal belongs all the time in your office, dormitory

And lets be honest: we care about our smartphones more than for our keys nowadays. So

or home, beacons can become your magic finder. Mount beacons on your valuables and

having a smartphone key significantly lowers the chances of losing or forgetting it.

never lose them again. Kontakt.ios new USB Beacon is specifically useful in case you want

At least this is true for the residents of a building in Hoboken, New Jersey where KISI, a local

to have your laptop or other portable USB devices always within sight.

access control system company, deployed Kontakt.io beacons at 7 entrance doors.

Not only doors can be secured, though. With some imagination, you can find a security
appliance for beacons in many other areas. For example, anti-theft alarm systems for
vehicles.

Security

Transmission in chainless bikes and even cars can be upgraded with a beaconized lock that
unlocks your vehicle only after smartphone identification. The JIVR | Bike has such function
in combination with alerts and tracking system, which works similar to already mentioned
Blueanker app. Its a bike that is really difficult to steal!
https://webpage-cdn.kontakt.io/uploads/2015/03/12123135/JIVR-.jpg
However, security is not only about technologies, but also about people responsible for
guarding your assets. The human factor is always a weak link in many security systems. Just
remember all these James Bond or Mission Impossible movies to understand what I mean.

If you are looking to:

You can use beacons to:

Improve entrance security of your

Open doors with a smartphone by

However, beacons can help even here. We already mentioned how beacons help to
track cleaning staff in hospitals. If you will do the same for your security guards, youll be
able to see in real time how efficiently they are protecting the perimeter or if they are at
checkpoints on time.

venue, household or office

building beacons into electronic

Secure your vehicle

locks

Not only goods can be protected this way, but also people! For example, Elite-ID

Get a beacon-triggered notification if

Electronics has been trailing a system for swimming pools and fitness centers across

your bike or car gets stolen

Australia to ensure that lifeguards are effectively patrolling pools and prevent drownings.

Double secure your bike or car

Beacons saving lives once again!

Improve effectiveness of security

service guarding your facilities

by requiring the presence of your

smartphone for identification?

Track security guard and lifeguard
path pattern to improve overall
safety of your venues and visitors

Check out more use cases arranged by the industry.

10

Did you make it till the end?

Congratulations!
HIGH
FIVE

Chances are that you already found a beacon-powered solution for your business.
In this case, you would probably need some hardware to bring it to life. Luckily, we produce
a reliable high-performance product that can be on your doorstep en masse within a week.
See for yourself in our Store.
If you would like to learn more about proximity solutions, check out here more beacon use
cases implemented for various retailers, museums and events.

Conclusion
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