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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 35.9 ms ] threadWe 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.
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.