Note to readers: I’m writing a series about iBeacon. In this sixth and final installment in the series, I talk about iBeacon use cases beyond retail.
After last month’s iBeacon webinar, we kicked off several discussions on Aerohive's customer community. Much of the early conversation around iBeacons are about using them in retail environments, but 
the underlying technology can be used for more than just helping connect shoppers with purchase promotions.
After the webinar, we kicked off a thread on the community with a question about where iBeacons could be used and the results came in from many different user groups.
In presentations, I’ve referred to a few different use cases such as building better museum guides, or validating train tickets by calling them up when the conductor is near. In the iBeacon thread, the discussion suggested a few more:
- Using iBeacons in an education setting to assist with recording attendance
- In industrial environments, automating the safety lockout procedures so that machines cannot be turned on as long as they are under maintenance
- When members of a fitness facility are in the area, they can be given notifications on classes that might be of interest
- Checking in people for reservations. One example given was a public computer center, and automatically signing into a reservation upon walking in the door.
In general, iBeacons are useful any time you need to have an application interact with the world around it. I suspect there are also some really neat applications that make IP telephony even better. Now that a phone number does not need to be tied to a copper wire pair, or even a particular IP address, using proximity data as part of call routing decisions could lead to further enhancements in IP PBXes.
What is clear from the discussion is that this is the dawn of the beacon era, and there is many applications that have yet to be discovered. At Aerohive, we continue to be excited by the many possibilities that beacons will bring to Wi-Fi connected devices!
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Read more on iBeacons
iBeacon Part 1: What the heck is it?
iBeacon Part 2: How does it work?
iBeacon Part 3: You need an app
iPhone 6 + iBeacons + Wi-Fi: In-store shopping ups its game
iBeacon + Wi-Fi: Finally, "opting in" can be a win-win