- Estimated battery life was estimated very poorly.
- Nobody likes things they didn't ask for getting sent to their phone.
- 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).
- Speaking of indoor navigation, you need a ton of points to do it well (whether that's beacons or wifi routers, you decide).
- 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.
- 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.
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.
We've also implemented some adaptive algorithms to optimize the battery life in our beacons, so with conservative settings they should work for 5+ years now.
I was excited when I saw your indoor SDK, but it's too simplistic and not realistic enough for the production apps we have and are building (walking around and mapping every single room in a hospital is untenable).
I don't mean to bash your company at all here, so I'm sorry if this comes off that way. I also found that almost all clients scoff at ~$33/beacon when you're pitching something in the 10,000 beacon range. Even then, for $30/beacon I can get ones that run off the wall circuit and last until that's off (for all intents and purposes, longer than 5 years).
Obviously at 10,000 beacons we're talking enterprise pricing, but even if you were to get that to around $5 that's still too much for what's essentially a CR2032 battery and a tiny radio chip.
I'm excited to see where Estimote takes beacons though, since they seem to be doing the most R&D type pushes with this technology compared to the other manufacturers.
I hope that some OS level improvements give us some free reliability and performance increases. Supposedly Android recently got some updates re: beacons.
Why don't you fit the beacons on the ceiling?
I would be much happier paying the same amount for something that looks like a AA battery and will last a few years.
no affiliation. haven't tested the units yet. [1] http://www.bluecats.com/
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.
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.
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).
Plus purely engineering problems, such as unreliability, poor battery life, etc.
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.
For instance, to precisely know which vehicle you're on when showing arrival estimates or vehicle locations. You can also determine a bunch of other contextually aware info when you know which vehicle a user is on (traffic delays, detours, trackwork, etc)
Post-men do it all the time.
>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
You are missing the point, too. I guess, the value of iBeacon is in reception, not transmission, as is also said about RFID terminals, while it still may have some other use.
While I agree that beacons are over-hyped, I think it's worth pointing out that BLE does other things that I think are more useful. Being able to talk to devices without having to perform the awkward pairing process, for example.
Pairing can be combined with connecting in a lot of situations though, and I believe the Bluetooth standard, as well as implementations are moving towards simplification. For example, I'd rather have a list of BT audio speakers around me directly in my music player app, then I'd just tap on one of them and hear music playing straight away. This is a protocol/API/UI issue rather than a fundamental limitation.
Well...I recall unpaired advertising events in the Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy Spec back in 2010 - way before Apple ever got involved.
[1] - https://www.bluetooth.org/docman/handlers/downloaddoc.ashx?d...
The only piece missing from the puzzle was that phones only have one Bluetooth aerial, so triangulation would have been impossible. It would still be possible to determine unitless distance.
Or, in other words, no thanks.
[1] -http://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/exclusive-hundreds-o...
[2] - http://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/hidden-beacons-were-...
[3] - http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/qualcomm-spins-gimbal-be...
[4] -https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2013/12/09/qualcomm-a...
Unsubsidized price then? No response.
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.
At this stage, it still looks like a technology solution in search of a consumer problem (it certainly solves the "how do i push indoor location based ads/etc" problem, but consumers don't care or want that).
Watching most of these companies is like watching microsoft announce the xbox one.
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).
Even some of the examples are just a result of otherwise poor planning on companies part.
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.
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.
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).
I struggle to think of an interesting use case on the consumer side for beacons.
Maybe locations for things that move like booths at a farmers market or something.
(All of the antennas are registered, along with type, propagation, etc, with the FCC, and they produce a large database)
Not that TV signals are great.
But even the bluetooth group itself says not to use beacons:
"According to the Bluetooth Special Interest Group,[24] Bluetooth is all about proximity, not about exact location. Bluetooth was not intended to offer a pinned location like GPS, however is known as a geo-fence or micro-fence solution which makes it an indoor proximity solution, not an indoor positioning solution."
The grocery store example is something I've been debating creating for myself. I have a hunch if I stick Estimote stickers underneath stuff at my grocery store no one will find them for a while.
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.
However, you could use the BTLE GATT profile. This lets you expose services & characteristics/attributes. It does allow for two way comms.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
You could treat the UUID as a domain name, have a DNS-style system where an app looks up a UUID, gets some structured data, and caches it.
That does mean, for your bus example, that you would have to have seen one of those UUIDs before while internet connected, in order to have the route data already cached.
If someone is going through the effort of placing bus beacons, there's a good chance that the location either already has good data coverage, or they could place a wifi hotspot at the same time.
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Alternatively, certain UUIDs could be taken to mean "connect to this device over wifi, and download structured information". This does have the battery issues mentioned in the article, but I expect that, for permanent installations, people will prefer externally powered beacons anyway.
Also it's not required that you go talk to the internet after hearing a beacon - if you already knew what beacons to look for and what to do about them, you wouldn't need to use the internet at all to create "local notifications."
Also, my wife works at a school that allows students to sign out of their classes into other classes. Beacons would be great for this - "student X is not in the room they said they'd be in".
And this is actually a poor excuse:
concerned that google stores your search history and has your email? - dont use google.
Don't like Facebook sharing your friend list with advertisers? - delete your facebook profile.
Don't want your browsing history agregated and sold to the highest bidder? - stop using websites
Worried that government listens to your phone calls and reads your text messages? - move to another country.
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.
- home automation, get home in the dark & lights go on or other possible location based activities.
- conference badge/phone app, allows user to interact with displays or other conference attendees + more
- other ideas.
IMO advertising via bluetooth would make people turn off bluetooth, and leave it off.
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.
Battery beacons are only usable for a couple toy usecases in my opinion.
So can phones get decent info about distance to any WiFi/bluetooth source, or is there something about beacons?
