Geofencing

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What Does Geofencing Mean?

Geofencing is a technology that defines a virtual boundary around a real-world geographical area. In doing so, a radius of interest is established that can trigger an action in a geo-enabled phone or other portable electronic device.

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Techopedia Explains Geofencing

Geofencing allows automatic alerts to be generated based on the defined coordinates of a geographic area. A simple example might be an email or text message that is automatically triggered and sent to a user’s cell phone when that user’s child arrives home from school. In this example, the geofence would be a geographic virtual boundary surrounding the house. When the child’s cell phone enters this area, an email is automatically sent to the child’s parent by a geofence-enabled app on the phone.

Triggers do not have to happen because of a physical presence. It would be possible to establish a geofence area around a neighborhood and have alerts sent out on garbage collection days based on a schedule entered in a geofence-enabled app by the local government or collection company.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist
Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.