One emerging element of the new-look web operating system is the beacon, and Google’s Eddystone project is a good example of a technology which, though open source, it controls, and which handles an important element of user behavior behind the scenes, regardless of the individual OS. The Eddystone beacons currently run with Android and iOS but could be adapted for any platform, and more importantly, they can broadcast messages to smartphones through the Chrome browser without the need for a specific app. Support for Eddystone is built into the ‘Nearby’ API, available to developers from Google Play Services, or from GitHub under the Apache 2.0 licence. The latest addition to Eddystone is ephemeral ID (EID) frames, which will allow developers…