Google Launches Bluetooth Beacons
Google is launching its Eddystone Bluetooth beacons - small boxes that communicate information about a physical location to those nearby it, accessible via a passerby's smartphone or wearable device. Although similar to Apple's proprietary iBeacon, the Eddystone has one crucial difference, it is cross-platform compatible, meaning it will work on more than just an iPhone. Earlier this year, Facebook rolled out a similar line, the imaginatively titled "Facebook Beacon". 
Move over iBeacon—today Google is launching "Eddystone," an open source, cross-platform Bluetooth LE beacon format. Bluetooth beacons are part of the Internet of Things (IoT) trend. They're little transmitters (usually battery powered) that send out information about a specific point of interest, and that info is then passively picked up by a smartphone or tablet in range of the transmitter. A beacon-equipped bus stop could send out transit times, stores could send promotions to the customers currently in the store, or a museum could send people information about the exhibit they're standing in front of.

The name "Eddystone" might sound a little weird, but Google says it's named after the Eddystone Lighthouse in the UK. The motif is that beacons guide users and apps in the real world the same way lighthouses guide ship captains in the night. Being an open source project, they wouldn't want to name it "Google Beacon." It fits in well enough with the other non-obviously-branded open source Google projects like Android, Chromium, or Dart. This also isn't something they need to sell to the general public, just beacon OEMs and app developers.

We were able to talk with Eddystone's Product Manager, Matthew Kulick, and the Engineering Director, Chandu Thota, about the project. They described Eddystone as a "robust, extensible" beacon standard. "We have been working with many of the ecosystem partners to figure out the actual use cases, and we realized that existing solutions only partially address what is being asked for. We wanted to pull in businesses, developers, and the manufacturers and create an ecosystem that they can rally behind," Thota said. "There was a real desire from talking to them for a unified common ground that could be openly discussed, improved, and built on top of," Kulick told Ars.

Like iBeacon, but more open

At this point some of you are likely saying, "This already exists! It's called iBeacon!" Apple's two-year-old iBeacon standard has a number of problems though, the main one being that it's a proprietary standard that only works with iDevices. This mean it's cutting out half of the US smartphone market and 80 percent of the worldwide smartphone market. When you're hoping to recruit companies to use this to advertise to their customers, immediately missing 50-80 percent of the possible customer base is a tough sell.

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Eddystone is cross-platform—support is built into Google Play Services' Nearby API on Android, and it can be used via a library on iOS. Eddystone is also open source and is available on GitHub under the Apache v2.0 license (we'll update with links later once this all goes live).

The openness of Eddystone is the big differentiator. In contrast, Apple is so protective of iBeacon that when one company, Radius Networks, got iBeacon support up and running on Android, Apple contacted them and had the product shut down.

Frame Types: Eddystone gets flexible

Eddystone's other big differentiator is that it supports multiple "frame types"—basically data payloads—that can perform a variety of functions. Previous solutions from Apple (iBeacon) and Google (The Physical Web) have only served one purpose.

Bluetooth beacons are one-way communications, so usually the goal is sending a notification that, when tapped on, will launch a more capable form of displaying or transferring data. "Because Eddystone is comprised of these different frame types, you'll see different beacon vendors using Eddystone for slightly different purposes," the Eddystone team told us.

Universally Unique Identifier (UUID)—A UUID is a 128-bit value that separately identifies every specific beacon in the world, which an app can listen for and perform certain actions for. For instance, imagine if Starbucks deployed beacons to all its stores. The Starbucks app could be programed to listen for these specific beacons that Starbucks owns, knowing which store (and sometime where in the store) the user is at from the beacon ID in order to then do something—send coupons, connect to Wi-Fi, or whatever else you can think of (and have user permission for).

A UUID is exactly what Apple's iBeacons send out, but iBeacon can only send this type of information. Eddystone's other frame types make it much more flexible. The downside to UUIDs is that they are tied to developers (like Starbucks) so you need the appropriate app do anything with the information. This brings us to the second Eddystone frame type.

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URLs—Sending a URL instead of a UUID is much more universal and friction free—it just opens in a Web browser. While a loyal Starbucks customer may have no problem keeping the Starbucks app installed, a user standing in front of a soda machine really doesn't want to install a special app to just buy a soda. For those one-time data transactions, you'd want a URL.

URLs are basically the "QR Code" version of a beacon. The advantage over a QR code is that you don't need a QR Code reader app, and you also don't need to see, target, and take a picture of a QR code. With beacons, the URL finds you. A beacon-delivered URL could be broadcasted to everyone in a restaurant without needing a million QR codes plastered over the restaurant.

Google has a project called "The Physical Web," which accomplishes a similar thing—broadcasting URLs from a Bluetooth beacon. This has the same inflexibility problem as iBeacon, in that it only sends this one frame type. Again Eddystone is a more flexible, unifying standard that also covers this use case. The Physical Web project will actually be switching from its current "UriBeacon" standard to the new Eddystone-URL frame type.

Ephemeral Identifiers (EIDs)—An EID is a secure frame type—imagine a personal beacon that only authorized users can read. Google doesn't offer many details about this new frame type other than to say will "change frequently and allow only authorized clients to decode them." The company says this would be for things like finding your luggage when you get off the plane or finding your lost keys.

Beacon technology can tell how far away the user is from a beacon, making this a more high tech version of the Motorola Keylink, which just helps you find your keys by beeping really loud.

Telemetry Data—This last frame type is for companies that need to manage vast fleets of beacons. Beacons often run on battery power, meaning the batteries need to be changed, so the telemetry frame type would send diagnostic data and remaining battery power to your friendly neighborhood IT person. They could then hunt down the broken beacons and fix them.