iBeacons are fast becoming the foot soldiers of indoor location in retail, bringing awareness and adoption, but it is just one of over 10 indoor location technologies competing in this $5 billion space.
A host of new, higher-accuracy, "infrastructure-free" technologies are forecast to change the face of and use case for indoor location in the future.
ABI Research's senior analyst Patrick Connolly said, "We see huge growth for infrastructure-based technologies like Wi-Fi and iBeacons, with BLE deployments forecast to break 20,000 by 2015, largely focused on retail. But the arrival of high-accuracy handset-based technologies like sensor fusion, LED, magnetic field and a host of others, will also enable a whole new set of consumer applications and services around ambient intelligence, social networking, corporate/enterprise, fitness/health, mobile advertising, and gaming. With over 800 million smartphones actively using indoor location for applications by 2018, it will be as standard as GPS is today."
