
Show HN: Proximity Beacons with programmable NFC - jimiasty
http://blog.estimote.com/post/147038205465/announcing-next-gen-proximity-beacons-with
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dolphenstein
Theres an interesting product over at kickstarter. Seems to be getting a quite
a bit of traction. Beacon with a whole bunch of different sensors. All open
source! [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/463050344/ruuvitag-
open...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/463050344/ruuvitag-open-source-
bluetooth-sensor-beacon)

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jimiasty
Hi HN, this is Jakub, founder of Estimote, Inc. (YC S13).

We just integrated the latest Nordic nRF52 BLE chip and made possible for
proximity beacons with built-in programmable NFC. Beacons support iBeacon or
Eddystone/Physical Web and might be a nice toy to play with latest Google
Instant App Downloads via NFC/Physical Web feature.

Happy to answer any questions here.

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Mandatum
I'm struggling to find important, or new use cases on your forums for your
product. Can you offer some non-obvious ones?

Using it as a key? Not that much easier to use than a smart card/NFC. A fair
amount of consumer education required for adoption. Not available to all
consumers, all the time.

Tracking? I find the price for beacons and the restriction of range makes
other solutions more practical.

Location-based triggers/actions (ie walk into a room, light turns on).. Tech
and solution exists without your product. A phone has GPS and actions can be
taken based on boundaries..

The single best place I can see this applied is to the shipping industry and
daily ops tracking of very high value products. But it seems like a very
small, and obvious use-case.

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jimiasty
Here you can see a long list of use cases:
[https://community.estimote.com/hc/en-
us/articles/207295257-A...](https://community.estimote.com/hc/en-
us/articles/207295257-Apps-and-projects-with-Estimote)

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Mandatum
Thanks for taking your time to reply. There's a few novel ideas for industries
where personnel location is very important especially when an incident occurs
(ie construction) which is another viable market. I look forward to seeing
what other applications can come from your products.

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coldcode
Meanwhile idiot Apple sits on their NFC api which can do all the same things
as Android, except they're idiots and keep it to themselves. Meanwhile we
struggle to get iBeacons to do anything even remotely useful to us.

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heypiotr
Actually, we did a bunch of testing at Estimote and we strongly suspect that
the NFC in iPhones is just the "passive" variety, the same that's being put
into contactless cards and the new Proximity Beacon => it's not capable of
scanning other passive tags. Unlike the Androids, which are "active", i.e.,
can power the passive tags through induction & scan them. So it might actually
be a hardware limitation, not just Apple's reluctance to open up the API.

