• by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, November 18, 2014

While beaconing is still in its infancy and slowly developing into what it might be when it grows up, there are some substantial numbers starting to be associated with it.

As in beaconing itself, the numbers and metrics around it are still a work in progress.

For example, at the recent MediaPost IoT: Beacons conference in New York, an executive from Lord & Taylor and Hudson’s Bay, one of the earliest large-scale beacon deployments, said they were looking at linking with mobile apps that can reach in the vicinity of 50 million people.

The idea being that using only a retailer’s own app to interact with in-store beacons severely limits the reach to only shoppers with that particular app.

Mobile retail platform InMarket just announced that comScore has audited its beacon-enabled app reach of 32 million monthly active consumers.

The InMarket approach is to link to shopping apps that customers already use on a regular basis, the idea being that beacon-triggered messaging through one of those apps is more natural as opposed to messaging coming through an unrelated app while a person is shopping.

And in yet another numbers-loaded announcement today, Mobiquity Technologies, which has a deal for beaconing more than 200 Simon Malls, is partnering with mobile app platform Mobile Roadie.

The ability to trigger beacons from Mobiquity Networks will be added to the thousands of apps powered by Mobile Roadie, such as Wynn Las Vegas, Taylor Swift and the Dallas Mavericks. The company says those apps reach more than 50 million users.

In these early days of beaconing, one of the first major hurdles is to create enough potential reach for beaconing, which means more apps will have to be capable of being triggered by a particular beacon set.

The question remains as to which apps consumers will want or expect to receive beacon-triggered messages from.

While these numbers are big, there still are more to come as various beacon plans evolve behind the scenes.

For example, beacon-maker Estimote says its beaconing technology is in use by more than 30,000 developers, with many potential installations still under the covers.

And Adobe just expanded its beacon app capability so that beacon-triggered in-app messaging could be sent through the Adobe Marketing Cloud platform.

While these numbers are large, they will evolve and ultimately be replaced by other numbers.

The new numbers are likely to be associated with old letters: ROI.