Ifinity, a Polish company offering tailor-made ibeacon micro-location services, is one of first to introduce AirBeacons, which do not require battery power supply. As explained on their blog, the solution eliminates the most serious technology barrier: the necessity of replacing the battery or beacons periodically.
As you may know, beacons are small, coin-sized devices that are placed in offices, shopping centres, stadiums and train stations, which can communicate with our mobile devices, allowing us to interact with objects or services available at the spot or navigating us where GPS navigation is not working. So far this ground-breaking technology has had one weakness. Beacons required an internal power supply from batteries, which meant they had to be replaced, in some cases even once a year.
But now, Ifinity has successfully solved this problem (Update – May 2023: The startup seems to be no longer in business under this website, and we therefore deactivated the original link). Their new generation of iBeacons – called AirBeacons – extracts power from a single source of low-current ambient electromagnetic waves. This solution eliminates the complicated process of beacons or battery replacement, minimises malfunctions and as a result, improves the precision of the micro-location system. AirBeacons are also much smaller in size, meaning that they can be installed in places that are difficult to access.
Michał Polak, CTO and Co-Founder of Ifinity, explains: “Despite our great experiences with previous generations of beacons, our clients indicated the need of periodic replacement of batteries as a major limitation. In cooperation with our partner we have designed a prototype of a transmitter which does not require internal power supply. Currently we are in the middle of testing and planning production. We plan to deliver Airbeacons to first clients as early as in the fourth quarter of 2014.”
AirBeacons clear the way to implement complex indoor navigation systems at shopping centres, vehicle way-finding in parking lots and public spaces, ‘Electronic Shelf Labeling Systems’ in hypermarkets, equipment inventories in hospitals, storage spaces and more.
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[…] chosen amongst 155 European cities participating in Bloomberg Mayors Challenge.As we wrote about Ifinity, a Polish company offering tailor-made ibeacons microlocation services, will lead the Virtual […]