Interview with David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of Basecamp, author of Rework) about his philosophy around software development and Agile methodology.
Interviews with eight engineers from different backgrounds to explore and explain why software is more complicated than it looks even to a trained eye.
Wojtek from Estimote team here: actually, Google is approaching this very conciously when it comes to privacy and UX. You need to opt-in to see those URLs in notification center, then metadata is fetched so you know what you click, and still no tracking is possible until you actually click.
Also, they're iterating very fast with Physical Web, but it's still in experimentation phase. Physical Web for Chrome is big news, but keep in mind that Chrome on iOS has ~5% penetration.
The infrastructure you'd need for your beacons is the same as Nextbus (i.e. trackers on public transport and a city data feed), but Nextbus requires no distributed/deployed devices. Therefore, rolling out a beacon approach must have more overhead than something like Nextbus. You really can't come up with a reason why these beacons are better for that use case.
Hell, just put up a QR code at the bus stop. What could be cheaper than that?
Wojtek from Estimote here. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and sorry for the delay with stickers: it took us longer than expected to reach mass production. It was a lot of work (and admittedly more time than initially assumed) to get the enclosures, firmware, PCB and antenna design, and SDK just right. But we'd rather change the shipping date than compromise on product quality. While in software development you can go with the 'f--- it, ship it' mantra and fix stuff with rapid release cycle, it doesn't really apply to hardware.
The initial hurdles are behind now and we're shipping a lot of Estimote Stickers daily now, burning through the backlog fast. All pending pre-orders should ship by the end of Spring, or in early Summer at the latest. You can send me your order number to wojtek[at]estimote[dot]com and I'll check what's the status and when it's going out.
First, a full disclosure: I'm a Community Evangelist at Estimote, a beacon startup.
Now, to the point: I believe saying that iBeacon is about tracking customers and targeted ads is missing the point. iBeacon is about providing apps with microlocation context. Of course you can use it to deliver ads through your apps or to track users, but if there's no value for the users, why would they install the app in the first place?
iBeacon is not privacy violator or value adder by itself. It's a tool developers can utilize, just like GPS data, or Google/Apple Maps, or any kind of API, to enable their apps with new funcionalities. Beacons will most likely serve as kind of a 'web cookies for the physical world' because of their contextual marketing potential, but this doesn't mean beacon-enabled apps will not hold any value for the end user. There already are businesses building pretty cool solutions on top of iBeacon, ranging from dining apps (Downtown, Cover, Tab), smart office platforms (Robin), museum apps (Canadian Museum of Nature, Brooklyn Museum), to dating apps (Blinq). We wrote about some of the examples we find pretty awesome: http://blog.estimote.com/post/108266442445/ibeacon-fueling-s...
It's all about the experience you deliver. Beacons can be used to deliver tons of value (frictionless mobile payments, location aware audioguides, home automation). But at the end of the day, iBeacon is just a protocol for broadcasting a string of numbers over Bluetooth Smart. It's up for beacon platforms and vendors to make unlocking this value as easy as possible, and for developers to take advantage of that and create cool, useful solutions. Some time ago with a fellow Evangelist from Estimote we've written a post about considering UX in beacon-enabled apps. I think it's relevant to this thread: http://blog.estimote.com/post/101427444795/ux-for-the-real-w...
'Web cookies for the physical world' sounds exactly like what I depicted - and I guess we all know what the impact of web cookies have on privacy [1].
The reason I wrote this post to begin with was the lack of advertising iBeacons generally have had. This could however be caused by me living in Norway and not having the same exposure for new technology as someone in (for instance) SF has.
Although I admit that the usage examples you present are valid, I still can't help but think that if something is free then I am most likely the product. To expand on this: If I was given an iBeacon at a shopping mall I would immediately suspect that the data which was being generated to improve my 'shopping experience' would mostly benefit the shopping mall.
You keep referring to only a single use case of iBeacon - retail & shopping. This is the biggest market for beacons and retailers surely will use beacons to gather data. But so does Amazon, and I'd say that more people like Amazon because of offering products they're likely to buy, than hate them because they store their shopping history.
Anyway, there are lots of other uses of beacons. In other cases, no one claims you're getting anything for free. When it comes to dining apps: if they deliver great experience, restaurants will be more likely to use them to keep more clients coming. If Robin's smart office software works well, you will pay them to use it, because they're a SaaS company. If a museum's app makes an exhibition much more entertaining, you'll come back to see the next one. There is no 'hidden fee' anywhere: they use your location data to improve their services. Surely there will be violators, who want to take advantage of this data without offering value in return, but iBeacon is opt-in by design: you need to download the app and give it permission to access your location. What's the chance you will keep using an app that isn't useful and violates your privacy?
Basically, it's a bit like with Uber: yeah, you do share your location. And thanks to that, Uber leverages users' data to adjust fare rates and number of contractors, optimizing their business. But your benefit is clear - you get a great service, much better than huge majority of taxi corporations.
As for advertising: from what I've seen, beacon vendors are pretty visible in AdSense and do a ton of retargeting. We do at Estimote, I've also seen banners from Radius Networks, Kontakt.io, Urban Airship, and at least a couple of others. But I've seen their pages a bajilion times, so that makes me a good target for the ads :) There was also a lot of press about beacons in the last few months, especially with Facebook and Groupon entering the space with their pilots.
