Page 32 - GBC winter issue ENG 2019

How Beacon Technology Works
Golf course positions beacons around course
The beacons get connected to a Bluetooth enabled Smartphone
The signal is sent to the phone and the app opens
The course can provide the visitor with information and an interactive experience
To try and overcome these limitations for a person’s mobile device, geo-fencing was developed. This is a virtual perimeter for a real-world geographic area, like a radius around a point location. The driving force behind this has been location-based marketing. Unfortunately, it has not been very successful for several reasons: accuracy is still a problem, GPS is a big drain on your battery, is very expensive, and is invasive of personal privacy.
Fortunately, there is a new technology that has been re ned to be pinpoint accurate, has little drain on mobile batteries, is very inexpensive and can be set to a user permission level. I am referring to beacon technology and it has come of age in the past year with the release of Bluetooth/Beacon 5.0. Beacon technology has been around since 2013 but only in the past year has it been developed to the point of version 5.0 where it is now very robust. Put simply, they connect and transmit information to smart devices making location-based searching and interaction easier and more accurate.
HOW DOES BEACON TECHNOLOGY WORK?
Beacons are not much bigger than a golf ball and are like a small Bluetooth radio transmitter. They can be used indoors and outdoors. They run off low energy Bluetooth so when they communicate there is little battery drain on your phone. It uses much less power than you would use for a Bluetooth headset. The beacon itself can run several years on its own battery and the purchase cost is inexpensive.
Beacon technology is a perfect partner for today’s advanced mobile devices. Rich content/graphics can now be delivered in less than a second to mobile devices in proximity of beacons. Think of the beacon as a triggering device. A beacon will identify a mobile device within range and trigger a message to be sent to that device from an Internet portal or website.
The golfer’s mobile device will need to have Bluetooth activated and will require a mobile app downloaded to the device. Developing your own mobile app and web portal is an expensive endeavour. Fortunately, there are 3rd party apps and web platforms that you can use.
Beacon technology also addresses the invasion of privacy issue, as it uses a mobile app so messaging becomes permission based. Geo-fence, on the other hand, tracks a user’s mobile device movements without
them being aware, so the system can send a push noti cation message when the perimeter of the geo-fence is breached. This is an invasion of privacy and also infringes on anti-spam laws.
Beacon 5.0 made considerable strides and improvements over the previous versions. It now has a range of over 100 meters outside (the range is adjustable from 1 to 100) and it is faster and uses even less power. Beacon 5.0 has much more message capacity and an important improvement is multi channel operation, so one beacon can handle numerous messages simultaneously. It is now also compatible with Internet of Things (IoT). The downfall for previous Beacon users is that 5.0 is not downward compatible, so they will need the new 5.0 hardware.
THE BENEFITS FOR YOUR FACILITY
Beacons can provide precise loca- tion-based messaging, advertising and information. With a good back end system or portal, uses are up to the imagination.
Accurate proximity marketing from beacons can provide messages at the ideal time, so you can send “in the moment” messages to your golfers. For example, a series of messages can
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Golf Business Canada