Google Introduces New Open Format And Developer Tools For Working With

The standard is designed to help developers work with beacons and provide location-based content straight to users’ smartphones. The first is a Nearby API for Android and iOS, which makes it easier for apps to find and talk to nearby beacons.

Nearby Messages through the use of Bluetooth, WiFi, and inaudible sounds (as used in Chromecast and Google Tone, for example) can establish proximity between devices. This new format, which the company is releasing under the Apache 2.0 open source license on Github today, is meant to give developers a more robust and extensible way for working with beacons, as Google product manager Matthew Kulick told me earlier this week.

With compatible beacons (Google has signed on partners) and Eddystone, developers will be able to use other APIs such as the newly introduced Nearby API to build context specific apps, with a wide range of options.

Additional details about Eddystone could be found on Google’s Eddystone website here or you could a detailed report from Ars Technica here. For businesses, Eddystone means that it’s easy to secure and manage a whole bunch of beacons. (Apple, meanwhile, has shut down at least one attempt to support iBeacon on Android devices.) Google is also looking to tie beacons into its experimental Physical Web project, so they can deliver information without a dedicated app. The new format is completely platform agnostic (as long as the device supports BLE, it will support Eddystone) and any existing beacon can be made Eddystone-compatible with a firmware update.

Let’s put an example to Eddystone: an owner of a football stadium has thousands of hardware beacons scattered all over their grounds for doing things like alerting attendees to the end of halftime. Just getting access to the status of each beacon can be hard, Kulick noted.

There’s a lot more information about these tools available on the Google Developer’s website. For now, though, Google won’t offer it’s own dashboard. Instead of talking about ads, the company says is planning on using beacons to send non-interruptive notifications to Google Now so that it can show relevant information based on your location, “like showing you menu items when you’re inside a restaurant”.