San Francisco, California and Krakow, Poland – April 14th, 2015: Today, Kontakt.io announced its Cloud Beacon, the first beacon solution with built in Wi-Fi and designed to manage fleets of beacons for venues – shopping malls, stadiums, and even airports. Beacons have long been hailed as the key to the Internet of Things, but implementations to date have been limited because managing enterprise-scaled deployment is difficult.
“Until now, having a single network of beacons across a chain of a thousand stores forced brands to manually configure each beacon to customize settings, update firmware, or reconfigure for security reasons,” explained Szymon Niemczura, co-founder and CEO of Kontakt.io. “With the Cloud Beacon, we’re connecting beacons directly to the Internet, making it possible to remotely manage any number of beacons in any number of locations.”
In most cases, initial implementations of beacons were focused on one-way signal distribution that trigger an application in a smart device like a phone. Managing those beacons meant individually configuring each beacon at every location – a frustrating hurdle that required too much labor and training to be cost effective. Additionally, because beacons could not have their power settings easily changed, they were always on, even when no one was around to receive the signals, which drained the battery life and utility of the devices.
The Kontakt.io Cloud Beacon has the ability to change the configuration of each beacon from a central location, and can turn beacons to a “Power Sleep” mode when there is less traffic, extending the battery life up to four years. The Cloud Beacon also makes beacons more secure, randomizing each beacon’s unique identifier to prevent hijacking of a beacon network by a third party.
Beacons are part of a constantly evolving sector of business – the Internet of Things – and Kontakt.io’s technology is constantly evolving to meet this growth. Kontakt.io’s Cloud Beacon makes it easier to deploy more beacons in more places with enhanced security and improved battery life.
Added Niemczura, “Kontakt.io recognizes that the ‘I’ in IoT is extremely important: beacons don’t talk to the Internet without something to help them. Our newly launched Cloud Beacon is going to transform what people can do with beacons and hyper-local data in general.”
