Beacon Technology | Europe Proximity Sensors Market - Growth, Trends And Forecasts

Source    : businesswire
By        :   Laura Wood
Category  : Beacon Technology Nepal, Bluetooth Beacon Technology 

The Europe Proximity sensors market is expected to increase to $1.12 billion by 2018 at a CAGR of 7.15% over the period 2014-2020. The need for enhanced production efficiency in verticals such as process industries, automotive manufacturing and industrial applications is expected to be the key driver for the proximity sensors market in this region.

Additionally, pollution control and worker safety in Europe have led government regulations aimed at improvements. These regulations have a positive impact on the proximity sensors market, increasing demand for automation and strong growth in capital investments are the key drivers which are making the Europe Proximity Sensors market to grow lucratively.

The growth of the proximity sensors market is currently being hindered by limitation in product variation among different manufacturing companies and Limitation in sensing capabilities. Photoelectric proximity sensors technology is the fastest growing market, because of their extensive use in automotive and material handling applications.

Meanwhile, capacitive proximity sensors technology are estimated to have the highest growth rate throughout the forecast period. Magnetic Proximity Sensors are the preferred choice for the detection of non-contact magnets. Further applications are of automatic door units such as garage doors or doors inside buildings, elevator doors and doors inside railway coaches. The building and automotive sector are further industries using high volumes of proximity sensors.

(Source : businesswire.com/news/home/20151218005952/en/Research-Markets-Europe-Proximity-Sensors-Market-- )

Bluetooth Beacon Technology | Real Strength in Deploying Beacon Technology

Source  : Mediapost
By        : Brandi Lalanne
Category  : Bluetooth beacon technology

When beacon technology became available to consumers, I spent a week geo-fencing my house and tagging my dog, JayPeg, to track whether she was sneaking naps on the couch. This was a fun experiment and just one example of tracking real-world presence in the digital space that brands and their agencies can learn from.

Beacon technology’s current strength is its real-time analytics and tracking capability. Keeping this in mind:

Pitching beacon use to a brand as a way to push mobile coupons is wasting money on the fun toys rather than providing utility for the targeted customer.
Attempting to sell a beacon tactic that relies heavily on active customer participation (downloading a branded mobile app) just to send push notifications is a display of costly ignorance when it comes to user behaviors. It’s also a limited view of the technology’s capabilities.
The more powerful application of beacons would be to passively track and collect information about your customers and then use that data to present something meaningful to them.
Tapping into publicly placed beacons to collect data about clearly defined target audiences can yield rich results for brands. You can see where they go, when and if they go alone or with friends; what types of items they look at or interact with, to name a few. This massive metadata collected from a multitude of passive actions allows brands to develop a deeper understanding of their consumers and can blow open the marketing doors to highly relevant consumer engagement.

Both Facebook and Google are huge backers of beacons (and enormous data collectors/aggregators). Imagine your brand connecting to both Facebook’s and Google’s future beacon-integrated platforms to target and deliver messages to their user bases, rather than building your own platform. You’ll engage with Facebook’s 500+ million users where they already are as they scroll through their newsfeed.

Brands should be thinking about how to use the data these platforms’ beacons are already collecting to develop a strategy that adds relevance to the conversations happening and facilitate the consumer’s real-time moments.

For example, a user who posts a selfie to Facebook while using your product at your location could then be served relevant content instantly through the platform. This could enable you to quickly connect with them on social or you could harness their network by pushing ads for similar products to their friends.

Another option is to push the (relevant) collected data back out to consumers. How about informing the consumer that you are having a 50% storewide sale for the next hour, and that the sweater she looked at online is in stock, in the right size? This goes beyond retail; the city of Los Angeles is using this concept by displaying real-time parking availabilities across the city. Both of these tactics take the simplest functionality that beacons offer and push them further.

In my geo-fenced home, I confirmed that my dog was sneaking onto the couch in the early afternoons. I bought a dog bed and positioned it by a window. Using data collected from the beacon and applying insights, I provided my dog with a customer experience to keep her off of the furniture while still enabling her to watch the mailman.

How can your brand apply beacon technology to provide custom products or experiences that your consumers may not even know they want and avoid sending those annoying, unwanted push notifications?

(Read More: mediapost.com/publications/article/259985/the-real-strength-in-deploying-beacon-technology.html)

Bluetooth Low Energy | Extends BLE Portfolio for Banking, Industrial and Lighting Applications

Source  : Stocks Newswire
By        : Lisa Walker
Category  : Bluetooth Low Energy

According to the very latest news report, Cypress Semiconductor Corp. declared its highly integrated, single-chip Bluetooth® Low Energy solutions are now accessible in new packaging and temperature range options. The PSoC® 4 BLE Programmable System-on-Chip and PRoC™ BLE Programmable Radio-on-Chip solutions each now have an option for a micro-ball Chip Scale Package (CSP) optimized to bring Bluetooth Smart connectivity to secure credit card applications. The package is only 0.38-mm thick, making the reliable and fully Bluetooth-certified solutions, ideal to replace chip-on-board devices.

Cypress also offers solutions with an extended industrial temperature range option with operation from minus 40 degrees Centigrade to +105 degrees C. This ensures consistent product performance throughout this temperature range for industrial, automotive, and lighting applications that must operate in extreme climates. Both the micro-ball CSP package and extended industrial temperature options will be accessible for the 128KB and 256KB flash versions of the PSoC 4 BLE and PRoC BLE solutions. The new offerings are pin-to-pin compatible with Cypress’s original Bluetooth Low Energy solutions, simplifying upgrades.

“Bluetooth Low Energy is quickly expanding its market reach and Cypress is continually innovating to address requirements for a diverse set of emerging applications,” said Eran Sandhaus, Vice President, and Wireless Product Family at Cypress. “These new CSP and temperature options bring the ease-of-use, programmability and robust, low-power performance of our PSoC 4 BLE and PRoC BLE solutions to an even broader range of customers.”

Cypress’s customizable Bluetooth Low Energy solutions deliver unprecedented ease-of-use and integration for IoT applications, home automation, wireless Human Interface Devices (HIDs), remote controls, healthcare equipment, sports and fitness monitors, and other wearable smart devices. PRoC BLE is a Bluetooth Smart microcontroller with Cypress’s industry-leading CapSense® capacitive touch-sensing functionality, while PSoC 4 BLE offers expanded design versatility by adding intelligent analog and programmable digital blocks. Both solutions integrate a Bluetooth Smart radio, a high-performance 32-bit ARM® Cortex®-M0 core with ultra-low-power modes, up to 256KB flash memory, 36 GPIOs, and customizable serial communication blocks, timers and counters. Additionally, both solutions have an on-chip balun that simplifies antenna design while reducing board size and system cost.

Additionally, Cypress offers the small-form-factor, Bluetooth Smart, EZ-BLE™ PRoC module, which integrates PRoC BLE, two crystals, an on-board chip antenna, metal shield and passive components, all in a compact 10-mm x 10-mm x 1.8-mm form factor. It comprises Bluetooth 4.1 qualification and worldwide regulatory certification, greatly simplifying design and cutting time to market. Cypress is the single supplier for silicon, software, firmware and module hardware, streamlining the customer support required to develop remote controls, health and fitness equipment, home appliances, toys and other wireless applications. This combination of technology delivers unmatched system value for Bluetooth Smart products, with prolonged battery life, customizable sensing capabilities, and sleek, intuitive user interfaces.

Bluetooth Low Energy Design Tools

Designers looking to create Bluetooth Smart products must often use software tools from multiple vendors and develop complex firmware to meet wireless specifications. Cypress has abstracted the Bluetooth Low Energy protocol stack and profile configuration into a royalty-free, GUI-based BLE component that can be dragged and dropped into designs using Cypress’s PSoC Creator™ integrated design environment (IDE). PSoC Creator enables complete system design in a single tool, slashing time-to-market. Alternatively, users of Eclipse® and other ARM-based tools can customize their own Bluetooth Low Energy solutions on PSoC Creator and export the design to their preferred IDE.

Cypress offers the $49 CY8CKIT-042-BLE Development Kit, which gives users easy access to the Bluetooth Low Energy devices, while maintaining the design footprint from the PSoC 4 Pioneer kit. The development kit comprises a USB Bluetooth Low Energy dongle that pairs with the CySmart™ master emulation tool, converting a designer’s Windows® PC into a Bluetooth Low Energy debug environment. Cypress also offers two production-ready, reference design kits (RDK) that enable customers to get to market faster: the CY5672 Remote Control RDK and the CY5682 Touch Mouse RDK.

(Read More: stocksnewswire.com/cypress-semiconductor-corporation-nasdaqcy-extends-bluetooth-low-energy-portfolio-for-banking-industrial-and-lighting-applications/96150/196150/)

Beacon Application | Beacon Technology will let us kiss app clutter goodbye

Source    : Tennessean
By        :    Julie May
Category  : Beacon Technology

There is an app for almost everything these days. If you’ve been shopping lately, visited a tourist destination or gone out to eat, you’ve probably encountered the many businesses trying to get you to download and use their app on your smart device. So many apps, so little time.

We turn to our smartphones for the answers to many daily questions. What’s on the menu at my favorite restaurant? Are there any specials here today? What is worth visiting nearby? Often, a search doesn’t find the answer as quickly as we’d like.

Apps are well-intentioned tech efforts but are often expensive for businesses, because smartphone apps require regular redevelopment to conform to upgrades required by Apple and Android. Plus, they clutter up your smartphone’s storage and, when left running, drain batteries.

It’s frustrating for the customer — and in many cases, it’s not worth it for a business to create a custom app.

Wouldn’t it be great if answers just “came to you” based on your location or your preferences? You could stop juggling multiple apps and stop bogging down your smartphone.

According to Business Insider, “Beacons will directly influence over $4 billion worth of U.S. retail sales this year at top retailers, and that number will climb tenfold in 2016."

How beacons work

Beacon technology is an intuitive way for consumers to skip the smartphone app hurdles. A business can install these small pieces of hardware practically anywhere. Once they’re set up, beacons use Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to transmit information to nearby smartphones.  A business controls the information broadcast by beacons with a browser-based software system that maps each beacon and updates the messaging whenever, wherever you want.

BLE for Business

It’s easy to see how Bluetooth Low Energy beacons make sense for many businesses.

First, you install BLE-enabled beacons in key locations (on your corporate campus, in your hospital or at your shopping mall), wherever you might need to reach a customer with information. Your customers’ smartphone detects information shared by a beacon in their smartphone browser. You could share a map — or pictures, coupons specials, tourist information, audio and video tours, wheelchair locations — whatever is most valuable to your business and the user.

BLE for customers

As a customer, you’ll be able to kiss your phone’s app clutter goodbye. Best of all, you won’t have to figure out how to find the answer nearly so often. You may start to feel like your smartphone just reads your mind.

Beacon technology should even end up feeling less intrusive for customers, because it only works when the phone screen is already on, instead of sending lots of annoying popup notifications at inappropriate times. (Beacons that work directly with downloaded smartphone apps can still do this.)

The real game-changer here will be that allow practically anyone to get into the beacon beaming business.

(Read More : tennessean.com/story/money/tech/2015/08/14/beacon-technology-let-us-kiss-app-clutter-goodbye/31726825/)