Bluetooth beacons are everywhere, from warehouses to hospitals, delivering low-power and cost-efficient identification and location tracking at scale.
However, the first-generation of beacon technologies has notable limitations: provisioning is often manual and hard to scale, contextual status data can’t easily be transmitted and privacy and authentication models are weak or non-existent.
Meanwhile, expectations have evolved. Consumer products like Apple AirTag and Tile have raised the bar with privacy-respecting tracking at massive scale. New enabling technologies such as thin-film printed batteries, ambient energy harvesting and ultra-low-cost silicon are also redefining what’s technically and economically possible.
In this session, Donatien Garnier, co-founder of Blecon, will explore the path to a new generation of beacon technology that meets these modern demands. We will examine scalable provisioning techniques, privacy-preserving identity schemes, secure encoding of status data without pairing and the broader implications of recent advances in Bluetooth technology and its ecosystem.