A beacon is an intentionally conspicuous device designed to attract attention to a specific location.
The Bluetooth beacon is hardware transmitter — a class of Bluetooth low energy (LE) devices that broadcast it’s identifier to nearby portable electronic devices. The technology enables smartphones, tablets and other devices to perform actions when in close proximity to a beacon.

Here are some technical details about the Bluetooth Beacon Hardware: The bluetooth beacons are small battery powered devices. They emit a BLE signal. The signal is picked up by the phone, and often transmitted to a cloud server via the internet. The backend cloud server processes the information and performs further analysis guiding specific location based behaviors in the mobile device.
The hardware consists of a microcontroller with a Bluetooth LE radio chip and a battery. Coin cell batteries are the most popular choice for most beacons. These batteries are dense Lithium Ion cells and provide several months of battery life in a very small form factor.
Minew specializes in design and manufacture of beacon hardware. The services cover the complete spectrum of the product lifecycle from concept to design, manufacturing and after-market services.
Typically, a cloud based application backed parses all received beacon signals and takes actions, acting as the brain behind all operations. This usually happens via a mobile SDK.