The NFL Installed A Bunch Of iBeacons In New York City For The Super Bowl
The plan is to serve up personalized ads and alerts to people through their smartphones during the Super Bowl.
For now, The New York Times reports, the alerts are mostly limited to "practical news" like the nearest entry gate or promoting in-store sales.
"The power of this is it really is able to connect the real world, the brick-and-mortar world, with the virtual world with a level of granularity that hasn't existed before," NFL's general manager of mobile Manish Jha told The Times.
Beacons are a small, low-cost piece of hardware that relies on Bluetooth to transmit messages or prompts directly to a smartphone or tablet. Already, every consumer with an Apple product running iO7 is poised to receive and transmit Beacon messages.