Digital event Pause Fest and Melbourne digital agency Inlight have announced that the 2015 Pause Fest app will be powered by Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons, also known as iBeacon.

BLE beacons will be strategically deployed throughout Federation Square, the festivals digital innovation hub, enabling the Pause Fest app to deliver personalised notifications and content to attendees based on their exact location. For example, attendees will be alerted to nearby keynote presentations or presented with supporting video content while they’re viewing an interactive installation. Pause Fest is Australia’s premier digital event and runs February 9-15 in Melbourne.

“Pause is all about innovation, ideas and exploring the latest technologies,” said George Hedon, Founder and Creative Director, Pause Fest. “We’re thrilled to partner with the Inlight team to showcase this exciting new technology. Beacons will give us the opportunity to create unique interactions that enhance the festival experience and that’s what excites us most,” he continues.

Inlight are using their proprietary beacon management platform Lighthouse to manage content and provide detailed analytics on how attendees move through the festival and engage with the Pause Fest app.

“We’re excited to have the opportunity to deploy Lighthouse at Pause 2015,” said Ben Howden, Strategy Director, Inlight. “We can’t wait to surprise Pause attendees with relevant content and experiences as they move through the festival,” Howden continues.

Inlight are working on a number of other large scale beacon programs and have already completed deployments locally for a number of blue chip clients including Medibank and Spotless.

Beacons are small wireless devices that broadcast tiny radio signals using Bluetooth Smart technology, an intelligent and power friendly version of the Bluetooth wireless technology that has been around for years. Smartphones and other Bluetooth enabled devices that are nearby are able to listen for these signals and can then record data and trigger contextual experiences via a smartphone app.

The Lighthouse platform combines a cloud based management console to schedule and publish content and media, low energy Bluetooth beacons to install at venues, and a real time analytics platform to understand customer or employee behaviour and measure mobile campaign results.

The Pause Fest 2015 app, built by Inlight, is available on iPhone and Android.