Increasingly, retailers are looking to beacons to enhance the in-store shopping experience while simultaneously bridging their physical and online experiences.  Flexible, secure, powerful and durable: these are the most notable features being released this week as an innovative new provider, Beaconinside, launches its latest development in beacons based technology.

The second generation of Beaconinside’s beacon technology now offers full support for Secure Beacon, Apple iBeacon and Google Eddystone support. The latter Google option is an interesting one for advertisers, many of whom prefer to rely on Eddystone URLs instead of existing mobile apps.

In a further development of their beacons functionality, the company’s software now has greater flexibility as well: Beaconinside has opened up their Bluetooth service specification for other Proximity Service Providers (PSPs) in order to offer multi-vendor solutions and integrate into other existing back-end mobile systems. This openness and willingness to collaborate further is something that a majority of other beacon-based competitors have denied their customers purposefully the company claims, in order to create a lock-in type effect.

Michael Kappler, co-founder and CEO of Beaconinside, notes proudly of their beacon 2.0 development: “Our new hardware and software builds upon the successes of our first generation experiences, and adds on essential features and functions which will enhance the customer experience: increased battery life, Google Eddystone support and amongst the highest standards in our industry for security. In addition to an overall reduction in cost, we can say we’ve increased confidence in the beacon technology and can now guarantee the sustainability of installed infrastructure for the previously resistant retail market.”

The Berlin based company has now successfully tackled another major issue for the success of beacons based infrastructure: by working with the German premium battery manufacturer VARTA and using the latest Texas Instruments CC2640 Bluetooth low energy chip (BLE) available to the market, battery life of Beaconinside’s beacons has increased from two to more than five years. This is of a huge benefit to Beaconinside customers such as multichannel retailers who have been searching for ways to implement unobtrusive and largely maintenance-free beacons infrastructure.

Commented Andreas Preissler, Sales Manager, Retail, at VARTA Consumer on the development: “With an increase in battery life from two up to five years, we will be able to set new standards together with Beaconinside. The team at Beaconinside convinced us to bring on-side the best possible technology for this developing standard. For us it was therefore the next logical step to providing the best possible support, together with our battery expertise and to ensure effectiveness of their beacons even when utilisation rates remain highest.”

Beaconinside has further upgraded security features of both their hardware and software, as the new beacons now come enabled with advanced security features in order to avoid the misuse of their own beacon networks. Both new developments, Beaconinside BEACON and MANAGE products, can now protect users from unauthorised “beacon harvesting” (or the unauthorised access or reading of user data accessing unsecured networks) and spoofing (i.e. the cloning of beacons). This 2.0 development is based on the experience of more than 20,000 first generation beacons sold by the company, as well as the findings from more than 500 customer installations within retailers, mobile and digital agencies, universities and local German municipalities.

In a further announcement made this week, Beaconinside also declared it is actively engaged in strategic partnership with France-based Reload Labs in order to assist with their launch of their new lifestyle perfume product called RELOAD. For the company’s global launch in 1,300 shops in 27 countries across three continents, RELOAD will rely on the powerful support of this newest beacon development. It is also quite possibly the first time a fragrance dispenser has come pre-loaded with beacons functionality in an in-store environment!

All beacons technology available to market by Beaconinside is exclusively marketed and produced in Germany. For more information on the company or the beacon 2.0 generation software and hardware it has developed, please follow @Beaconinside on Twitter or click www.beaconinside.com