Beacons, the Internet of things, and more: Coffee with Timothy Jordan

August 21, 2015


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Posted by Laurence Moroney, Developer Advocate

In this episode of Coffee With a Googler, Laurence meets with Developer Advocate Timothy Jordan to talk about all things Ubiquitous Computing at Google. Learn about the platforms and services that help developers reach their users wherever it makes sense.

We discuss Brillo, which extends the Android Platform to 'Internet of Things' embedded devices, as well as Weave, which is a services layer that helps all those devices work together seamlessly.

We also chat about beacons and how they can give context to the world around you, making the user experience simpler. Traditionally, users need to tell you about their location, and other types of context. But with beacons, the environment can speak to you. When it comes to developing for beacons, Timothy introduces us to Eddystone, a protocol specification for BlueTooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons, the Proximity Beacon API that allows developers to register a beacon and associate data with it, and the Nearby Messages API which helps your app 'sight' and retrieve data about nearby beacons.

Timothy and his team have produced a new Udacity series on ubiquitous computing that you can access for free! Take the course to learn more about ubiquitous computing, the design paradigms involved, and the technical specifics for extending to Android Wear, Google Cast, Android TV, and Android Auto.

Also, don't forget to join us for a ubiquitous computing summit on November 9th & 10th in San Francisco. Sign up here and we'll keep you updated.