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Let's Talk About Beacons

nfarina.com

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Re: Let's Talk About Beacons

#21

Post by nfarina »

svarrall wrote: post #19

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?

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.

Re: Let's Talk About Beacons

#22

Post by xauronx »

bennyg wrote: post #15

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 on…

I absolutely agree with this. I pushed beacons really hard internally, and got a couple projects with them. Unfortunately, they're an absolute pain in the ass as far as reliability goes. One iPhone 5 detects the beacon immediately, the other has to sit around it for 3 minutes before it's detected, one can't detect it at all. Makes life pretty difficult when my only answer is "Is your bluetooth on?".

I hope that some OS level improvements give us some free reliability and performance increases. Supposedly Android recently got some updates re: beacons.

Re: Let's Talk About Beacons

#23

Post by xauronx »

nfarina wrote: post #12
BlackJack wrote: post #10

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 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.

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.

Re: Let's Talk About Beacons

#24

Post by bennyg »

xauronx wrote: post #22
bennyg wrote: post #15

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 on…

I absolutely agree with this. I pushed beacons really hard internally, and got a couple projects with them. Unfortunately, they're an absolute pain in the ass as far as reliability goes. One iPhone 5 detects the beacon immediately, the other has to sit around it for 3 minutes before it's detected, one can't detect it at all. Makes life pretty difficult when my only answer is "Is your bluetooth on?". I hope that some…

Ahh yes, I totally forgot about the phones maybe, sometimes, probably could this time work and range the beacons. Half the time my suggested method for getting the ranging to work is to delete app, restart phone, turn bluetooth on/off, redownload app, pray, sleep, buy new phone... It's unbelievable how ridiculously inaccurate the system software is using CoreLocation out of the box. I've written a wrapper for it (https://github.com/Intermark/Buoy/) to make internal dev a lot easier, and even then it's a pain in the ass to find why this prototype isn't working.

Re: Let's Talk About Beacons

#25

Post by 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.

Re: Let's Talk About Beacons

#26

Post by bennyg »

aflinik wrote: post #18
bennyg wrote: post #15

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 on…

(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 inter…

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.

Re: Let's Talk About Beacons

#27

Post by 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.

Re: Let's Talk About Beacons

#28

Post by riobard »

bennyg wrote: post #24
xauronx wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely agree with this. I pushed beacons really hard internally, and got a couple projects with them. Unfortunately, they're an absolute pain in the ass as far as reliability goes. One iPhone 5 detects the beacon immediately, the other has to sit around it for 3 minutes before it's detected, one can't detect it at all. Makes life pretty difficult when my only answer is "Is your bluetooth on?". I hope that some…

Ahh yes, I totally forgot about the phones maybe, sometimes, probably could this time work and range the beacons. Half the time my suggested method for getting the ranging to work is to delete app, restart phone, turn bluetooth on/off, redownload app, pray, sleep, buy new phone... It's unbelievable how ridiculously inaccurate the system software is using CoreLocation out of the box. I've written a wrapper for it ( ht…

I wonder whether the fault is at the iBeacon API/CoreLocation framework or the hardware beacons used? From your description above it sounds to me the hardware beacons are of questionable quality (low quality batteries and bad antenna maybe?)

Re: Let's Talk About Beacons

#29

Post by nfarina »

rmsaksida wrote: post #25

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 wa…

It's a tradeoff. Packing more data into the beacon would mean more spectrum used per beacon - also, changing what the beacons are saying is much harder than flipping a switch on a cloud server.

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."

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