I’m fairly new to Beacons but I like what I see so far
As far as I understand, the beacons are sending a signal which can be detected by a Android or iOS phone. On the phone is an app that detects the UUID of the closest beacon and does ‘something’ based on this detected UUID. It would be fairly difficult to ‘hardcode’ the content (text, images, video…) in the phone app itself so I wanted to create a system that associates content to UUIDs (major/minor) but before to do so, I was wondering what other people use here? The idea would be that the CMS is having a JSON API that could be used by the apps no matter if Android or iOS.
Some people build their own “mini-CMSes,” some people integrate beacons with their existing systems … but there’s also quite a few ready-made solutions out there already. Most of them have a lot bells and whistles (e.g., their own SDKs with UI components, analytics, campaigns, etc.) and also incur a monthly fee because of that—e.g., Rover, Bleesk. I assume you’re looking for something simpler for starters, if so then maybe https://pushmote.com?
UPDATE: forgot about Google’s freshly introduced Proximity API:
It’s a bit hard to use at the moment in my opinion (e.g., there’s no graphical interface at all, you need to provision beacons and their “attachments”—their word for the content associated with beacons—you need to do that via API calls), but it’s fairly flexible and free). Here’s a great, albeit a bit lengthy, article exploring its capabilities:
When it comes to simply scanning for beacons, yup, you don’t need Estimote SDK for that.
The SDK comes handy if you want to manage your beacons, just like you said, but also if you want to use our Secure UUID, analytics, cloud integration, fleet management.
