HN Explorer

Why I think iBeacons will flop

2 points by michaelmcmillan ↗ HN
I can't recall any advertisement regarding Apples new iBeacon technology (in short: a bluetooth device that can be traced). If you think about it, it kind of makes sense that there has been little or no advertisement at all: The iBeacon is not a consumer product. It's a product for businesses, to track its customers.

For a consumer to actually want to use an iBeacon it would have to offer something of value. As I currently see it: It does not. I doubt that targeted ads is a good enough selling point to make people want to use them. Hopefully it has the completely opposite effect.

However, a handful of startups has newly arised that claim to utilize this technology in a way that will revolutionize the way offline and online presence works. Still unsure of what this exactly entales, I would argue its another step in the direction of less control of privacy.

My point is that iBeacons will most likely flop. Simply because it's not something people want. It's something businesses want. In a way it can be compared to what PG would describe as a "sitcom startup idea". It sounds clever, but the execution of this concept will fail due to the lack of actual demand for the consumers.

I am sharing what I think, I'd love for anyone to pitch in on what they think.

6 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 19.9 ms ] thread
ashleyp
Interesting point. However as a consumer/developer I can think of lots of fun things to do with beacons that have nothing to do with businesses =). There are far more things you can do with them then simply targeting ads.
jp555
iBeacons are like GPS, just dumb timers pingining a number over radio. You could have said the same thing about GPS in the early days.

How about a museum app that guides you to the nearest bathroom or the next exhibit you want to see? Or your watch could buzz you towards your airport departure gate or seat without ever needing a glance.

Even retail there are many opportunities that aren't advertising; how about helping you find 32" waist jeans in a pile of them? The tech is sub-centimetre accurate. How about a grocer partering with recipes.com and guiding you aroud to ingredients you need?

Then we could use it to guide autonomous devices indoors ... Maybe you play games in your car while a robot grocery cart shops for you, or maybe have it ready for pickup or drone delivery?

[dead] stray
If the only use you can think of is for businesses to track customers, it would seem uninspiring.

But it can also be used for individuals to know more precisely where they are in a space. And with a little work, where they are relative to other people.

I was working on a system back in 2008-2010, I ended up giving up on it because I couldn't find a practical way to determine an individual's location within a room.

The most promising approach seemed to be a grid of bluetooth devices on the ceiling. But that was impractical (what bar would allow it?) and couldn't be made to work because of the limits on how many bluetooth devices you could connect to.

So now iBeacon exists. And whenever I go back to my failed project from seven years ago -- I know what technology to reach for.

WojtekB
Hey there,

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...

Cheers.

michaelmcmillan
Thanks for taking the time to reply! :)

'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.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie#Tracking

WojtekB
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.

Cheers.