Content Publishing Program Based on iBeacon and NFC Technologies

This paper describes the creation of a program for publishing content bound to iBeacon and NFC tags. IBeacons and NFC tags are transmitters with signal range 50m and 5cm respectively. Devices equipped with NFC and Bluetooth adapters can register the signals and perform desired actions: for example, they can show a message on the device’s screen. As can be seen from the technologies’ growth in popularity in the last years, they have big potential for commerce use. The subject area of this work are museum guides: museums’ administrators can create electronic museum guides and publish them in the aggregator application. The museum customers can install the aggregator application on their Android smartphone and scan NFC and IBeacon tags installed on the museum exhibits in order to retrieve the information about the pieces. This paper presents an analysis of the application’s competitors and proves the existence of demand for the application. Furthermore, the paper reviews the technologies used for message exchange with the IBeacons and NFC tags as well as examines the chosen server solution. Finally, the paper discusses the infrastructure and architecture of the application’s components. The result of the work described in this paper is a developed application and a package of technical documentation for the application. The paper contains 66 pages, 3 chapters, 17 diagrams, 7 tables, 10 sources, 4 appendixes. Key words: Android, Firebase, IBeacon, NFC.