Picture credit: Samsung
Samsung has announced mobile communications solution Proximity, a rival to Apple’s iBeacon, but could the requirement of a different beacon technology for each handset manufacturer cause problems for retailers?
Proximity is a mobile platform not unlike iBeacons. It lets visitors to a specific location view rich, relevant content and allows advertisers to target those consumers with more pertinent campaigns.
The main difference between the two products is that Proximity operates on a system level as it is fully integrated with Samsung’s software. Instead of needing a native app as per iBeacons, in-store push notifications will seem like they are part and parcel of the operating system.
Reduction in apps
While Proximity solves one of the criticisms levelled at iBeacon, which is that iPhone owners might end up having a vast number of apps for perusing different brick and mortar stores, it potentially adds yet another technology retailers have to invest in and then get to grips with.
Marketing Tech spoke to Bristol-based beacon technology firm CPAgroup about Proximity and the company’s owner Simon Richardson had his own opinion on the strategy retailers with a limited budget should take.
“Retailers are right to be sceptical about iBeacons in general and they should only have to invest in one technology,” he said. “Whether Apple and the other Android smartphone manufacturers agree with this is a point of debate.”
Apple vs Samsung
Richardson did say that the transmissions between beacon and handset are fairly simplistic, so it would be unusual if retail partners ended up having to work with one supplier.
However, Samsung and Apple do have a history of coming to blows over their technology and there is not yet enough information on Proximity to ascertain if it will require unique hardware to communicate with handsets.
Marketing Tech reached out to Radius Networks, one of Samsung Proximity’s hardware suppliers, for more information on the support of multiple handsets but did not receive a response at the time of publication.
UPDATE
Marc Wallace, CEO and Founder of Radius released the following statement to Marketing Tech:
“The market for proximity services and technologies is dynamic and exciting right now. Companies like Apple and Samsung are innovating at an amazing pace to leverage the best of their mobile devices and operating systems. Emerging beacon industry standards like Apple’s iBeacon, Samsung’s Placedge and the open standard AltBeacon each solve the proximity challenge in their own way.
“The challenge to the proximity services industry is to develop innovative solutions that make the underlying beacon technology transparent to the user. At Radius Networks we provide platforms to enable major brands, retailers, and others to combine each of these technologies into a unified solution that delivers the absolute best proximity-enabled mobile experiences to their customers.”
