With the holiday shopping season in full swing, Apple has come out with a new app to help facilitate shopping in a retail store by sending you notifications of where you can find items in a store based on your particular interests. The app is called iBeacon.
The tracker provides indoor location services to 254 retail stores in the U.S. When enabled by a customer, iBeacon uses a Bluetooth connection with the customer's iPhone or iPad device to know his or her location in the store and will send targeted messages to the mobile device and give a detailed description on where the user can find those items.
According to the L.A. Times, iBeacon will be able to send other kinds of messages as well such as product and event information. Apple's flagship New York City store is equipped with about 20 iBeacon devices, some of which are just iPhones and iPads. The Apple devices are able to track others thanks to new software that came with Apple's latest iOS 7 update.
While the app is appealing to the holiday season, Apple has said that the potential for iBeacon can go far beyond simply being a personal shopping application. iBeacon could one day be used to send information to parks, museums and other types of indoor locations where GPS apps cannot accurately track people's movements and locations.
Customers interested in trying the iBeacon app next time they go into an Apple Store simply need to enable Bluetooth on their smartphone or iPod and download the Apple Store app.
So far some of the people, such as those at PCMag, have had trouble getting the app to work in some of the company's New York retail stores. Even asking employees there for help. However, given the fact that the system just launched on Friday so it's not completely unexpected for it to have a few startup glitches.
