
Let's Talk About Beacons - nfarina
http://nfarina.com/post/101309491728/lets-talk-about-beacons
======
bennyg
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:

\- 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.

~~~
aflinik
(Disclaimer: I work for Estimote) Indoor location works much better if you
utilize data from other sensors in the phone (like accelerometer etc) and
apply machine learning to make better sense out of all the signals. I'd
suggest you take a look at our SDK that works surprisingly well even with just
4-5 beacons. You can also map your room with our iOS app by just walking
around it. You can find it here if you're interested:
[http://estimote.com/indoor/](http://estimote.com/indoor/)

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.

~~~
bennyg
The beacons my company received from you guys must have been out of the norm
then. All 3 Estimote beacons are dead, and they all died around the same time
(one in super conservative mode, one in what should be a normal use case, and
then one in max power mode).

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.

~~~
aflinik
Thanks for your feedback! Sorry to hear about faulty beacons, what happened
definitely doesn't sound normal. I'd suggest to contact our community team at
contact@estimote.com and they're probably able to replace these beacons with
new ones.

Indoor SDK is still in very early phase, but we're pushing very hard to roll
out a series of updates with new features like multiple rooms support, cloud
integration and even better accuracy, so you can expect more comprehensive
solution in the near future.

And if you're interested in bigger deployments we also offer beacons in bulk
quantities with much better pricing.

We're treating R&D very seriously as we're thinking of beacons as much more
than simply hardware. There's still a lot of ideas to explore and we try to
support the community as much as we can, so I hope you'll give it another
chance.

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts. That's extremely important to us and
makes it possible to address issues people have with beacon technology ASAP

~~~
bennyg
Yeah no problem, I'll talk to my director at work to reach out about the
beacons since he's been the point of contact with Estimote so far. Thanks for
following up and fielding my concerns/criticism. Like I said earlier, I
honestly can't wait to see what you guys come out with next in advancing this
technology.

------
mojuba
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, _No Thanks_.

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.

~~~
nfarina
I think the technology here is so deceptively simple and generic that it's
hard to say what the true killer use case is yet. It's definitely unfortunate
that the "ads" examples are the most prevalent. Despite that, I'm betting devs
will find cool and novel uses for it.

~~~
qzervaas
Public transit is one of the more compelling uses for beacons. If every bus,
say, transmitted their vehicle ID you could improve the real-time experiences
in third-party apps.

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)

------
drewda
"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.

------
primitivesuave
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.

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.

~~~
nfarina
These kind of experiences are entirely up to the app developer to implement
properly in a way that's not annoying like you describe. It can be done in a
way that is nice (i.e. not notifying over and over). Not saying they'll all do
it right at first, or even for a while.

------
DannyBee
Beacons.

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.

~~~
ljoshua
What would be some of the better alternatives for doing indoor location? It'd
help me a bunch to see a few examples, as I was previously thinking of beacons
for this purpose.

~~~
DannyBee
You can do a better job of indoor location by using tv signals, than you can
with beacons.

(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."

~~~
ljoshua
Interesting thought. But I can't sample TV signals from a mobile device. I'm
looking at applications that can be implemented underground as well, unique
use case. And in this case, proximity might be just fine enough rather than
positioning.

~~~
DannyBee
"Interesting thought. But I can't sample TV signals from a mobile device. "

You couldn't sample FM radio or GPS from them in the past either :)

But honestly, i don't expect this to take the world by storm either, i'm just
pointing out it's a better possibility of working for the use case of "indoor
mapping".

" I'm looking at applications that can be implemented underground as well,
unique use case. And in this case, proximity might be just fine enough rather
than positioning."

Underground is really hard, yes. If all you care about is knowing you are
within 40 feet, great.

Truthfully, specialized wifi points are likely to be better for indoor
positioning than bluetooth.

------
swamp40
> * In fact, referring to these devices as just “Beacons” is a bit funny,
> considering no one was talking about Beacons before iBeacons existed.*

Well...I recall _unpaired advertising events_ in the Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy
Spec back in 2010 - _way_ before Apple ever got involved.

~~~
nfarina
Absolutely ... this wasn't an entirely new "invention," although Apple's
technique of cramming their metadata in the spec is definitely novel, although
nonstandard.

~~~
CHY872
Mmm, I'm not so sure. If you read the Bluetooth 4.0 spec [1], it's very
obvious on page 1047 (numbered 801 in the pdf) the exact advertising format,
with its block of bytes for sending data. Sending a UID would be exactly what
you would do, as a first approximation. There are actually much more
interesting schemes that can be used - say if you don't want your competitors
to be able to derive any information of their own from your beacons.

[1] -
[https://www.bluetooth.org/docman/handlers/downloaddoc.ashx?d...](https://www.bluetooth.org/docman/handlers/downloaddoc.ashx?doc_id=229737)

------
iamshs
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].

[1] -[http://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/exclusive-
hundreds-o...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/exclusive-hundreds-of-
devices-hidden-inside-new-york-city-ph)

[2] - [http://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/hidden-beacons-
were-...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/hidden-beacons-were-also-
installed-in-la-and-chicago)

[3] - [http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/qualcomm-spins-gimbal-
be...](http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/qualcomm-spins-gimbal-beacon-
technology-separate-company/2014-05-01)

[4]
-[https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2013/12/09/qualcomm-a...](https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2013/12/09/qualcomm-
announces-availability-its-gimbal-proximity-beacons-enable)

~~~
rdrey
They can only be used as "micro-surveillance tools" once you install an app
that shares your proximity to a beacon with a remote server... and by
installing a 'malicious' app you've already lost.

~~~
iamshs
Yes, an app is required to trigger the surveillance since beacons are one-way,
but not really a 'malicious' app install. If tomorrow candy crush/angry birds
want to tap into the gimbal database, well congratulations. Worst, if
FB/Google want to tap into the database, nearly every android/iOS phone with
BLE on will be a target due to their massive app install base.

~~~
mojuba
What about beacons being not so one-way? Assuming you enabled the beacon on
your own phone for whatever reason (some fancy app), then information can be
gathered easily without you giving permission or noticing at all.

~~~
nfarina
Absolutely true, but this is also possible with just about every other
technology today. "Bad Apps" can report information about Beacons, GPS, or any
other sensor on the phone they have access to.

~~~
mojuba
Hm, maybe not so easily with other technologies. GPS is a passive thing and
you can select which apps can use it. Beyond that or outside of your phone
nobody will be able to register your location.

WiFi is active and yes, wiretapping is possible, at least for locating you.
Hardware/software for doing this though is not readily available as far as I
can tell.

Finally, iBeacons: very simple software running on a passive BLE device that
simply records all BLE UUIDs passing by, that's all!

------
BlackJack
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?

~~~
nfarina
It was surprisingly challenging to come up with just those two examples to be
honest. I don't think we really know what the killer location-based
notifications are going to be yet.

~~~
xauronx
Personally, I really like location-aware app features. My favorite is search
suggestions. If I'm in BestBuy and I open the app to the products section,
chances are I want more details or reviews on the product I'm standing in
front of. Why make me search for it? Have "smart suggestions"

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.

~~~
click170
Because if you're standing there on you're phone, there's more of an
opportunity for their sales person to come over and upsell you on their
Service Plan.

Think about it from their point of view :)

------
orand
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.

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.

~~~
nfarina
Scanning for arbitrary beacon IDs is not possible on iOS by Apple's design.
You could certainly do that on Android however.

~~~
orand
Interesting. So is it possible for Apple devices to dynamically exchange their
beacon IDs amongst each other (perhaps via an app's back-end service) to
enable my second scenario of devices being "paired" and monitoring proximity
to each other?

------
svarrall
How do you manage 1,100 beacons at once App side?

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?

~~~
nfarina
For region monitoring (typically used for the "notification" case) the limit
of "fences" is indeed 20...it gets into a bit more detail about "what's a
fence" [edit: most of the time you can assume one monitored beacon == one
fence]. But for "ranging" meaning "what beacons with this UUID are around me",
the system gives you a report of visible beacons every second with no
(defined) upper limit.

------
paulftw
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.

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.

------
rmsaksida
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).

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.

~~~
Yen
It's still possible to have a general-purpose app for beacons, you just need
to make that structured data available in a standard format on the Internet.

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.

\---

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.

------
mattei
If I had the coding ability I'd play around with these:

\- 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.

------
slg
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.

~~~
nfarina
Wifi-Beacon interop is quite new; it turns out the Wifi network at Levi's is
_really_ dense so it does have insane coverage. Also the Beacons are
surprisingly visible even without further interop tricks - you can see them
across the stadium at times.

------
cwiz
My colleagues at Shopster [[http://getshopster.com/](http://getshopster.com/)]
are implementing really awesome indoor navigation project with 300+ beacons
installed in largest Russian mall. See demo:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAM4bJst2Jw](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAM4bJst2Jw)

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.

------
driverdan
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.

------
Pxtl
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.

So can phones get decent info about distance to any WiFi/bluetooth source, or
is there something about beacons?

------
TomGullen
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.

~~~
Pxtl
Yeah, that was my reaction - AR gaming would be the killer app.

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".

------
heywire
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.

------
0xdeadbeefbabe
Beacons are nifty, but buying shoes is comparatively boring. Why do consumers
get soooo much attention from these smart people selling smart phones?

~~~
nfarina
I think everyone's trying to save retailers from Amazon :)

------
abava
you can try to use Core Bluetooth devices as tags:
[http://bdp.linkstore.ru](http://bdp.linkstore.ru)

------
amelius
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. ~

Or, in other words, no thanks.

~~~
achivetta
Who is suggesting that users would carry beacons?

~~~
saeguaiga
Only the specialized economists who suggest people would ever need to have
signs, surely. Also, the rare restaurant that wants to garner advocates. Then
perhaps amateur entomologists. Works engineers who want to know when something
erodes would surely bury fiber optics rather than a RFID or battery device
with 30 year lifetime.

