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Thank you, bravo22. I appreciate the clarification - I obviously misunderstood the capabilities iBeacons offered. Kind of sad though, I think there's a huge opp

Thank you, bravo22. I appreciate the clarification - I obviously misunderstood the capabilities iBeacons offered. Kind of sad though, I think there's a huge opportunity in providing hyperlocal capabilities the way I described. So let me check my understanding: what I'm seeing is that there are only two scenarios that make iBeacons useful: * the mobile app has to have all possible beacon id's hard coded (or configurable by the user) and mapped to desired responses. The tradeoff is that any growth in the iBeacon network necessarily requires an app update. * the mobile app has to function like a dumb terminal, receive a ping, then query a separate server asking what's special about that ping. This avoids updating the app, but adds a whole new point of failure to the system. Thanks again for your response. very helpful.

bravo22 12y ago
You are correct. Think of iBeacons as kinda of like GPS. They feed you data, not the other way around. You can certainly have more advanced capabilities w/ BLE -- similar to what you suggested -- but you'd have the single master problem. To comment on your understanding: The app doesn't need them hardcoded, it can query a server and say: here are the beacons I see, where am I? Alternatively you can include location information in the data broadcast by the beacon. So one of them can say I'm at the end of isle 1, the other says I'm at the start of isle 1, and yet another says I'm at the end of isle 2. You can figure out your approximate position by their relative signal strengths. They can even have broadcast the exact GPS coordinates of where they are located (hardcoded in them of course) which if I recall correctly Apple can use to update their location service to give you very accurate positioning. Bear in mind though that beacon data, unless encrypted, is public but even if encrypted it can be duplicated so someone can mess with you by creating a duplicate tag and placing it nearby.

bravo22 12y ago

You are correct. Think of iBeacons as kinda of like GPS. They feed you data, not the other way around. You can certainly have more advanced capabilities w/ BLE -- similar to what you suggested -- but you'd have the single master problem. To comment on your understanding: The app doesn't need them hardcoded, it can query a server and say: here are the beacons I see, where am I? Alternatively you can include location information in the data broadcast by the beacon. So one of them can say I'm at the end of isle 1, the other says I'm at the start of isle 1, and yet another says I'm at the end of isle 2. You can figure out your approximate position by their relative signal strengths. They can even have broadcast the exact GPS coordinates of where they are located (hardcoded in them of course) which if I recall correctly Apple can use to update their location service to give you very accurate positioning. Bear in mind though that beacon data, unless encrypted, is public but even if encrypted it can be duplicated so someone can mess with you by creating a duplicate tag and placing it nearby.