I am writing to you all from Sunny Australia, I love the idea of the estimote beacon’s and see many applications for my clients. I had a few foundation questions.
If we have a network of beacons say 100 in a chain of customer retailers and these offices are separated by a great distance. Is there anyway to network these beacons to the internet so they can communicate directly to the estimote cloud to receive updated instructions?
I am a little unsure of how to send updated details to the beacons once offsite, I think I understand that the beacons only push certain data if using iBeacon?
Beacons do not have Wi-Fi or cellular connection. We’ve actually spent a lot of time figuring out how to best solve fleet management, and we’ve came up with a pretty elegant, API-based solution. Our Fleet Management API lets you update beacon settings by leveraging your app’s end users as relays. So if you integrate the API into your app and schedule settings changes, settings will be updated whenever a user of your app approaches the beacons.
Also, keep in mind beacons themselves don’t broadcast any other data than their identifiers. So if you want to, e.g., associate an image or message with a beacon, you need to do it either in your app, or better yet, in a cloud-based beacon content management system. Then, if your app detects beacon with ID “X,” it can query the system, and the system figures out that “for beacon X, you need to show this image of a shoe.” The huge advantage of that is, you can update what data is associated with the beacon in the system itself, and you don’t need to change anything in the beacon. Basically, you simply say “beacon X used to be associated with an image of a shoe, but since now, if an app comes asking about it, beacon X is now associated with an image of this watch.”