Beacons help make Industry 4 a reality.0

We are today in a phase of redefining the capabilities and purpose of beacons. There are more and more applications powered by this technology, not for consumers, but to support logistics and resource management in large enterprises, hospitals, warehouses or airports. Customers Contact.io prove that beacons in B2B environment can generate benefits on 4 different levels:

Asset tracking. Beacons help not only monitor where products are, but also reduce the risk of errors or optimize company resources.

Real-time process management (runtime monitoring, heatmapping, task delegation, etc.).).

Gathering data to help make business decisions based on hard statistics.

Increasing employee security and controlling access to sensitive areas of the company.

It is with these applications in mind that we released 4 new products in August, including Gateway, which in combination with Location Engine (a new software tool) provides the ability to monitor the movement and status of beacons in real time, as well as trigger a number of actions based on location.

Bluetooth 5.0 on the horizon

The big event in the industry will be Bluetooth 5.0. Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), the developer of the new standard, announces that it will have four times the range of its predecessor and will enable transmission of 8 times larger files. The speed of data transfer will also increase, by as much as two times. 4.0 features energy savings. In the next release it is expected to be even better. Today, Bluetooth, depending on the class, enables connections from 100 meters, 10 meters and 1 meter. Now each of these values is expected to grow 4 times. This means that Bluetooth 5.0 class one will have a range of 400 meters, class two 40 meters, and class three 4 meters.

We can expect the premiere at the end of this year or in early 2017.

I firmly believe that the changes in the proximity market are just the beginning. With the release of Bluetooth 5.0 we will enter the era of cost-effective and easily accessible IoT. More flexible and efficient Bluetooth technology, combined with off-the-shelf solutions for the B2B sector, make the idea of Industrial Revolution 4.0 will finally become a reality.