As an iOS developer who has spent the last 9 months making beacon enabled things for my employer, I personally think beacons are shit. Some of my findings over the last 9 months:<p>- Estimated battery life was estimated very poorly.<p>- Nobody likes things they didn't ask for getting sent to their phone.<p>- Indoor navigation that relies on iBeacons only is going to shoot you in the foot. I recommend www.indoo.rs as the only solution that got close to what we needed (though it's still pretty darn immature).<p>- Speaking of indoor navigation, you need a ton of points to do it well (whether that's beacons or wifi routers, you decide).<p>- Using beacons for granular location-aware uses might as well go out the window if you're looking for accurate and precise readings around ~1-3ft.<p>- Did I mention power yet? All of the beacons we started with around 9 months ago have dead batteries. Even with conservative power modes set. The only beacons that don't are RadBeacons USB sticks that plug into wall outlets. And that's only because they don't have batteries.<p>I really, really want them to be good. But they die too quickly, and don't provide granular signal data. Hold the phone between you and the beacon and get a decent signal, then turn 180 degrees so that you are between the phone and the beacon. Apparently you've moved 45ft.
I don't know why everyone is talking about pushing ads in the first place, whenever BLE beacons come up. As if the visual clutter created by outdoor advertisement wasn't enough, now I'll get garbage on my phone? No, thanks. Really, <i>No Thanks</i>.<p>As the article mentions, it's not obvious what value iBeacons provide compared to direct audio/visual information. For the same reason QR codes never took off. Ever since QR came into existence I haven't seen a single person who'd voluntarily scan a code (or an NFC label for that matter) in the street, anywhere in the world.<p>Clearly iBeacons/QR/NFC are not interesting in terms of providing information "on the spot", let alone advertisement. OK, then maybe microlocation? Finding lost items? Checkin/checkout? Payments? I don't know, none of these is so unique and indispensable that it triggers the excitement light bulb in me. Most of these things can be achieved somehow else, except maybe finding items lost within 20-30m from where you are.<p>Maybe the problem is that iBeacons are a bit too passive/static. But even a full BLE device that can transmit a bit more complex information is still debatble in terms of value. Where are the BLE A/V remotes, why aren't they replacing the IR ones? Would you trust a BLE baby monitor? How important is BLE for fitness tracker users? (Answer: somewhat, but if BLE never existed everyone would just use the USB connection to charge and exchange information at the same time, no big loss).<p>Plus purely engineering problems, such as unreliability, poor battery life, etc.<p>So let me be that guy who turns out to be wrong some years from now, but: despite the hype BLE turns out to be a niche technology with poor capabilities and questionable benefits.
"What we call a Beacon today was originally invented and popularized by Apple way back in 2013 when they introduced the iBeacon API." --> It's funny (and sad) to see how Apple is given credit for "inventing" so many different technologies.
Based on several months of experimentation last year when iBeacon dropped, we concluded that Beacons will be more pervasive in personal automation rather than business automation. The author of the post talked about some great business use cases, but in general these expect the user to have the beacon's corresponding app. For any kind of app, the user has to opt-in, so the apps they are most likely to opt into are the ones where users install the beacon themselves in order to have a corresponding app on their device automatically adjust to their location.<p>There is also much more value to the user in personal automation, and it isn't fraught with the privacy/scaling issues that business automation ideas are. In the grocery store example, how does the app know what the user has in their cart? How many times will it remind the user to pick something up (i.e. what is the user's "push message annoyance threshold")? What if the user decides they no longer need eggs, but the app keeps reminding them to pick up eggs - the friction from opening the app and having to remove an item from a shopping list just so the store's beacons will stop annoying you to buy it will make anyone seriously weigh the value of having the app in the first place. As the author pointed out, beacons in a commercial setting have enormous potential to annoy the hell out of consumers.<p>What I really want is a beacon that I can install in my home office, and another that I can install in my work office, so my computer can automatically open up the workflow I had open when I left yesterday. A great side effect of this is that I would be much less inclined to start the day with a dosage of HN.
Beacons.<p>The thing where everyone has some idea of what they want people to see it as useful for (Ads, etc), but don't understand how to jive this from what consumers want from them.<p>At this stage, it still looks like a technology solution in search of a <i>consumer</i> problem (it certainly solves the "how do i push indoor location based ads/etc" problem, but consumers don't care or want that).<p>Watching most of these companies is like watching microsoft announce the xbox one.<p>Everyone tries to sell indoor location, but there are better ways to do indoor location, cheaper, than placing $200 of beacons and meticulously mapping where you put them. So that isn't going to go very well over time (highly likely to be supplanted by something better).<p>Even some of the examples are just a result of otherwise poor planning on companies part.<p>For example, i don't want to know "things on my shopping list are nearby", i want to know, ahead of time, exactly where the things on my shopping list are.<p>It's only recently (past year or two) home depot or lowes would even tell me what aisle stuff was in.
I still can't go to a safeway website and get an idea what aisle my items are in.<p>In some cases, this is deliberate - they want you to have to browse.
In any case, beacons solve none of this problem (except maybe the "i'm in aisle 46 and i still can't find x" problem, but the distance issues often stop this from being particularly useful use case).<p>I struggle to think of an interesting use case on the consumer side for beacons.<p>Maybe locations for things that move like booths at a farmers market or something.
> * In fact, referring to these devices as just “Beacons” is a bit funny, considering no one was talking about Beacons before iBeacons existed.*<p>Well...I recall <i>unpaired advertising events</i> in the Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy Spec back in 2010 - <i>way</i> before Apple ever got involved.
Beacons are being used as a micro-surveillance tool [1,2]. And that is the only prominent use they have found, among all the ones listed. Interestingly Gimbal, is a Qualcomm company or rather was a Qualcomm company as it was spun off [3]. Gimbal also had $5 beacon giveaways [4]. Gimbal had embedded its beacons in phonebooths in Chicago, LA and New York [1, 2].<p>[1] -<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/exclusive-hundreds-of-devices-hidden-inside-new-york-city-ph" rel="nofollow">http://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/exclusive-hundreds-o...</a><p>[2] - <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/hidden-beacons-were-also-installed-in-la-and-chicago" rel="nofollow">http://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/hidden-beacons-were-...</a><p>[3] - <a href="http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/qualcomm-spins-gimbal-beacon-technology-separate-company/2014-05-01" rel="nofollow">http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/qualcomm-spins-gimbal-be...</a><p>[4] -<a href="https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2013/12/09/qualcomm-announces-availability-its-gimbal-proximity-beacons-enable" rel="nofollow">https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2013/12/09/qualcomm-a...</a>
Really cool technology. I think the really hard part is 'What is a good interaction?' Clearly the offer isn't too useful, but the hospital one seems good. In general, I think 'help me find stuff' and 'notify on exit' will be the dominant modes of beacon interaction. What do you all think?
It seems apps have to be built to recognize a fixed set of beacon IDs. Is it possible for apps to discover and monitor a dynamic set of beacons, including beacons intended for other purposes? I'd like to be able to tap into existing beacon networks for my own app's use, but that would require being able to detect their IDs, present them to the user in some meaningful way, and then have my app watch for them.<p>Another scenario where this particularly matters is allowing multiple devices (phones, tablets, PCs, watches) to "pair" and keep track of their proximity from each other.
How do you manage 1,100 beacons at once App side?<p>I thought Apple limited you to 20 region monitoring locations at a time, or are the beacons treated differently? Just logic around which 20 you're looking for at any one time?
While this is a very useful article, recurring attempts to convince readers that privacy is not an issue had an opposite effect on me.
I didnt even know spying was a concern, but when out of the blue I'm told "dont worry about privacy", and told five times in a row - well, this makes me suspicious :)
More unfortunate is the fact there is only one argument, served multiple times under different sauces: don't use the app if you think it does something creepy; vote with the delete button.<p>And this is actually a poor excuse:<p>concerned that google stores your search history and has your email? - dont use google.<p>Don't like Facebook sharing your friend list with advertisers? - delete your facebook profile.<p>Don't want your browsing history agregated and sold to the highest bidder? - stop using websites<p>Worried that government listens to your phone calls and reads your text messages? - move to another country.<p>To me these constant remarks about how you are always in control of your privacy were just annoying and not convincing at all.
The article would be better without that.
While I like the minimalism of the beacon API, I wonder if it doesn't limit the usefulness of this technology, as it leads to an over-reliance on mobile Internet (apps need to fetch information after detecting a relevant beacon) and/or preinstalled apps (which will probably not talk to each other very well).<p>It'd be interesting if beacons could send some structured data along with their identification header. This way you could have general purpose apps which handled common types of beacon data, and an user wouldn't have to install MegaWorld, GroceryMart and BigHealth to get generic grocery or health-related notifications.<p>For example: if there was a standard beacon format for bus routes, I could install a BusRoute app which would let me see bus routes for any beacon-enabled bus in the world, even in places where I don't have an Internet connection.
If I had the coding ability I'd play around with these:<p>- home automation, get home in the dark & lights go on or other possible location based activities.<p>- conference badge/phone app, allows user to interact with displays or other conference attendees + more<p>- other ideas.<p>IMO advertising via bluetooth would make people turn off bluetooth, and leave it off.
Do you know (can you share) if the WiFi and BLE networks at Levi Stadium were designed with each other in mind. I am wondering if it is truly as easy as using "a network that the venue probably already has" considering that all of the Beacons would need to be in BLE range of a WiFi device. I don't know enough about the ranges of each different technology or how their signals interact with all the various material that would exist in a football stadium. However I imagine that if you were designing these two networks in isolation, there is a decent chance that the required placements for full Bluetooth coverage and full WiFi coverage would leave some Beacons that aren't reachable.
My colleagues at Shopster [<a href="http://getshopster.com/" rel="nofollow">http://getshopster.com/</a>] are implementing really awesome indoor navigation project with 300+ beacons installed in largest Russian mall. See demo: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAM4bJst2Jw" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAM4bJst2Jw</a><p>And yes, we built custom beacons on top of OpenWRT routers & USB dongles –> hence high frequency updates, high power & no battery dependance. Also we built a mechanism that allows us to update majors/minors/uuids so that no external party can use our beacons.<p>Battery beacons are only usable for a couple toy usecases in my opinion.
How hard would it be to log all beacon identifiers detected by your phone and then have your phone (or another device) cycle through the list and rebroadcast them continuously? Seems like you could have some fun at large events with that.
I'm more impressed that phones can get any positional info from beacons. Determining distance to a radio source is hard with any fidelity - light is pretty fast.<p>So can phones get decent info about distance to any WiFi/bluetooth source, or is there something about beacons?
I think a cool use would be some sort of high tech paintball game. Have objectives to hold with beacons, and a listening device on all players guns. You can earn points by holding certain positions. You could come up with some pretty fun/dynamic scenarios.
Am I the only one who keeps my Bluetooth and Wi-Fi turned off unless I am specifically using them? I do this both for security/privacy and battery reasons.
Carry a beacon (or a bunch of them) with you into a shop and the store will recognize you the next time you enter. That's handy! It's like a cookie that you physically bring every time. ~<p>Or, in other words, no thanks.