With Apple’s iBeacon technology starting to see some traction, we thought this would be a good time to take a brief look at what it is and what we might expect from it in future.

The easy answer is that you can think of iBeacon as like GPS for indoor locations. Your iPhone is able to pick up the iBeacon transmissions and work out where it is with a high degree of accuracy. You could, for example, drive into an iBeacon-equipped underground parking garage, park your car there and then have an iPhone app direct you back to your exact parking space when you’re done shopping.

But the positioning side of things is really only half the story. The other half is that what gets triggered in your phone can be much more than a simple ‘You are here’ signal: it can be pretty much anything at all…and that’s where the role of marketing jumps in takes the lead.