(credit: Google)
About a year ago, Google announced "Eddystone," an open source, cross-platform Bluetooth LE beacon format. The Internet of Things initiative is a competitor to Apple's iBeacon, but it ups the ante by working on both Android and iOS and offering a wider selection of data payloads. Eddystone has been primarily focused on business and the enterprise, but today Google is providing more details on the secure beacon mode that it hopes will find its way into consumer goods.
Eddystone has four different frame types. Like iBeacon, there's the Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) payload, a 128-bit value that uniquely identifies every beacon in the world. The value itself isn't of much value unless you have an app from the beacon owner that knows to look for that specific beacon and do something with it. Imagine a Starbucks beacon that gets picked up by the Starbucks app and identifies itself as being at that specific store location.
For something a little more independent, there's the URL payload. The beacon beams a URL to every device in earshot that users can tap on to load a webpage. This is great for "one time" transactions where using an app would cause too much friction, like viewing a bus stop schedule or beaming money to a vending machine from your phone.
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