For the past few months, I have been researching businesses that make use of Bluetooth beacon technology for mobile app geo-location and proximity services. It is a bit of the “Wild West” for this particular flavor of technology right now, but some standards, like Apple’s iBeacon, are emerging and have the ability to “wake up” an app on your phone that is completely off. No, not sleeping, not in the background, but off.

From a marketer’s perspective, that is really cool stuff. You have an app on your phone that you have not used in months, but when you walk into my brick and mortar store . . . BAM, the app turns on, tells me you are there, and opens up a world of two-way interactive opportunities.

My mind was running wild imagining all sorts of creative customer experiences, but after a while, I decided it was time to fact check where iBeacons were being used in the real world today. After all, I carry a smart phone with seemingly every app known to man, but I can’t really name you a time when I, as an informed techie, believed an iBeacon was used to augment my physical world commerce experience. Were there any iBeacons out there in the wild in urban Atlanta? Were beacons driving in-app experiences that I was just missing? Were they there but just passively tracking my movements, collecting data, and lying in wait for their moment to spring into action and wow me into spending more money? It was time to find out.

Finding iBeacons in Atlanta – The Plan

My plan was seemingly simple. I would walk every isle of retail I could find with a iBeacon-capable phone “recording” all of the iBeacon signals it found. Interestingly enough, Apple, which created the iBeacon spec, makes this difficult if not impossible to do with an iPhone app. Android to the rescue. After a few hours of weekend Android hacking, I had an iBeacon “radar” app ready to go. The app would make the phone vibrate every time it detected a new iBeacon signature and would then record the signature, time, latitude, and longitude.

Let’s Go Shopping

The iBeacon hunt was on. Over two days, I walked every isle of every store at a large indoor mall and an outdoor retail district, visited several strip malls, hit as many big box retailers as I could find, and visited a trendy new urban retail district full of band new point of sale technology. Surely I would find a treasure trove of iBeacon goodness.

First Stop, the Mall

By the time I parked my car, I was already strung out with anticipation—like only a geek can be. I was clutching my phone wondering why it had not gone off ten times already since driving into the parking deck. Was the app working? Had I made a mistake programming or testing it? Was my sweaty palmed phone death grip blocking the Bluetooth signal? I did not have to wait long to find out. Twenty feet from the front door, my phone gave a triumphant buzzing sound, having found its first bounty. Now satisfied that I had not sacrificed my wife and children’s weekend only to be shut out on my first “Great iBeacon Hunt,” I quickly decided the most fun part of this game was going to be to try to figure out who in the mall was operating each newly discovered iBeacon. My phone could tell me when it found a signal, but information identifying the retailer is not part of the spec. For this first sighting, I had three choices: first, the mall operator could have put iBeacons near the entrances; second, there was a conspicuously large interactive Coca-Cola vending machine just inside the doorway . . . hmmm; and lastly, there was a Victoria’s Secret store in the running, too. This was getting fun.

Having been so immediately gratified, I absolutely expected to walk into a tornado of iBeacon activity. But of course, as I rounded the corner into the main section of the mall, nothing. Then I passed by a few more stores, and BANG there was another iBeacon. Another entrance and another Coke machine. I walked down a few more stores and nothing. Then all of the sudden, my phone erupted. It was like a volcano of iBeacons being detected all at once. What retailer could be so forward thinking to have already adopted this technology with such gusto? The Apple Store of course. OK, time to keep going. About this time, I noticed an ad for the Simon’s Mall app. If I installed the app, would it trigger offers and helpful advice based on my route through the mall? Disappointingly no. I opted into allowing the app to track my every move, shedding any expectation of digital privacy, but I got nothing in return. If Simon’s was indeed operating iBeacons at the entrances or other places in the mall, the benefit to me as a consumer was not yet obvious.

On to the department stores. If anyone can take advantage of beacons, you would figure it is a department store. Beacons are fabulously suited for informing a mobile app that I am, or at least my phone is, in the shoe department vs. the home goods department and so on. Someone at Macy’s had definitely figured this out. Multiple entrances and transitions between departments contained enough beacons to make my phone vibrate like a massage chair from Brookstone. Interestingly, Brookstone did not seem to have deployed any beacons yet. The two other department stores, Bloomingdales and Niemen Marcus, were a beacon desert—not a single one in either store.

Rounding out my trip to the mall with a visit to the food court yielded absolutely nothing until . . . yet another Coke machine and another iBeacon spotted. While this was not conclusive evidence, I decided Coke must be the early innovator. How is Coke going to use iBeacons to drive sales? Your guess is as good as mine, but I’m sure somebody at Coke is thinking a great deal about it.

The Wilderness

After making some initial interesting findings, the long middle section of my hunt was a very slow go. Big box after big box retailer turned up no beacons. Wal-Mart, Target, Dicks Sporting Goods, Pet Smart, Office Depot . . . all yielded nothing. Abandoning the big box hunt, I went to a new retail district known as Krog City Market. This is the type of place where all the merchants run new fancy tablet registers. I thought surely some of these innovative small merchants would be experimenting with high-tech marketing. Alas, nothing. Not a single beacon.

The Mother Load

My last trip was to Atlantic Station, a large outdoor retail district with everything from Banana Republic to Old Navy to Dillard’s. As soon as I stepped away from my parking meter, my phone spotted a iBeacon, but I was not particularly close to any specific storefront. That pattern repeated again and again. My phone was constantly buzzing but seemingly never near a specific store. Pretty soon, I started to suspect that iBeacons were placed on the property info maps, which were strategically located on most street intersections. I thought perhaps this was part of a mobile app navigation system to help shoppers move from one store to another. I downloaded the Atlantic Station mobile app to see whether I was correct. Nope, I was close but wrong again. One of the coolest features of the app was a “find your car” parking app. Excellent! In an outdoor mall where parking can be challenge, the app tagged iBeacons strategically placed in the parking deck and stairways so that it could automatically route your walk back to your car from anywhere on the property. What a brilliant use of iBeacon technology to provide excellent customer service.

Conclusion

In all, I visited about 200 different retailers, and my phone spotted a grand total of 77 distinct iBeacons. Although that number might appear anemic, in my mind, it is actually a great indicator that retailers are experimenting with and searching for ways to take advantage of this emerging technology. I think I’ll take my phone for a spin in six months to see how many more iBeacons are out there. I’ll bet the number at least doubles with two more leading big boxes joining the fray.