I am new here, starting a company and non experienced with the use of beacons. After reading articles and seeing some videos I am starting to get more and more enthusiastic about using it in my new business. Although some things are still unclear to me, so hopefully someone can help me out!
First I would like to know how phones interact information back to a beacon system. Can sending and recieving data between users in a room be completely offline? And what is the user capicity of a room where 4 beacons are placed in?
Beacons only broadcast simple IDs through radio waves. They don’t store any content, so it must be hardcoded into an app or stored in a cloud server. In the first case, delivering content will work without Internet connection, in the latter it won’t. You said something about recieving data between users, to achieve that you’ll definitely need some kind of a backend for your app because users won’t send data to a beacon, they’ll send it to the server.
It’s possible to connect to a beacon but users usually do that to change its settings or check battery life. To do that you must be an owner.
The added video is about instaconnect and Estimote. If I am reading your anwer correct I will need a simular construction like they show in the video at 4:12
In the example the beacon will recognise the users. From their the server gets involved to make a match between user profiles. In case of a match the users will recieve a push notification. But is the communication of the userprofile to the server and sending of a push notifications all done by the beacon? If yes the construction in the video could work for me.