Toronto start-up Aislelabs, which uses a cool mash-up of WiFi and beacons for retail analytics, has issued a terrific prime and study on beacons that looks at everything from design to spoof protection.
The report is called: The Hitchhikers Guide to iBeacon Hardware: A Comprehensive Report by Aislelabs. While the title suggests it is just about Apple support, it actually looks more broadly and includes Android.
Beacons have been gaining popularity recently. Numerous beacons exist in the market. The majority of them are powered by battery. In this report we present the first comprehensive comparison of various beacon hardware available in the market. Beacons come in all form and shapes, with diverse chipsets, battery sizes and firmware. We have stress tested beacons from 16 different vendors over past three months, examining every aspect of them under different conditions. In our previous report, we compared the impact on the phone battery (link), in this report we compare the beacons themselves across different parameters.
You can see the findings here … and even if you don’t need beacons, this piece does a nice job of explaining what they are all about technically.