Can anyone point me to examples of great beacon-based mobile apps / products / services?

Michael Chanover Head of Design at Shopkick

September 3rd, 2016

I'm doing some iBeacon homework. Can anyone point me to examples of great beacon-based mobile apps / products / services?

Joseph Mognon Entrepreneurial executive

September 3rd, 2016

Michael... This is not iBeacon based, but check out Tapcentive. It is even better... The website is just the tip of the iceberg. Let me know if you have any questions.

Sheeba Duleep Managing Partner

September 3rd, 2016

if you have any specific questions, I can ask my IoT team to answer. We are into IoT services and we use iBeacon for our projects.

Chris Martin Looking for a co-founder

September 4th, 2016

My business uses Bluetooth beacons for tracking and location. We have our own mobile app as well. Let me know if you have specific questions. www.tobudiscs.com

Michael Brill Technology startup exec focused on AI-driven products

September 4th, 2016

Michael, since you're in the thick of it... maybe a counter-question: why have beacons been such a commercial flop (so far)? We're 3+ years into it and really not much has happened - at least in the world of retail. People have had plenty of time for POCs, etc. Is it a failure of imagination? Are there technical problems?

Joanan Hernandez CEO & Founder at Mollejuo

September 5th, 2016

There are not "great" beacon mobile based product, because by OS design, beacons are meant to be restrictive. If not, it will be push messaging SPAM galore!

That said, there are really good situations on where to use beacons, those apps are being used, but they will not be world changing because it serves a narrow market, as intended. That's not to say there's no space for improving.

Answering your question, check out what the NFL has done, specifically, the 49ers mobile app with their stadium.

Cheers!

Gaurav Khanna Senior Manager, Virtual Systems Engineers at Cisco Systems

September 5th, 2016

Hi Michael -- please check out www.ankr.com

Nickolay Kolev Freelancer at Private

September 7th, 2016

OK, there are TONS of companies who use beacons to find your stuff. Enough already! It has been done (in different flavors), there are more or less successful companies that offer the same thing. I will not post company name, to avoid people complaining I am advertising anything.

What's next? I suppose that is Michael's question.

I support Michael's Brill question - why is this not taking off? Can we look further than using BT to find things we'eve lost? Are we lacking imagination? Is this a cool technology, which has no real application?

Nicolas Placide CEO at Skyvoice Telecom, Inc.

September 7th, 2016

I find indoor positioning very exciting. However, you need to take privacy concerns into consideration before even thinking about building your app. Macy's used to have an app with indoor positioning. They had to stop the experiment because of severe backlash.

I can think of a few good ideas for indoor positioning. In fact, there is a project I thought was pretty cool that I had started working on. It was a universal customer service app that would alert the nearest available store personnel of assistance request and guide them directly to the customer needing assistance. For example, an assistance request sent inside a Home Depot store would alert a Home Depot associate, and if sent inside a Costco would alert a Costco associate.

I originally implemented iBeacon for the iOS then ended up switching to another solution that would also support the Android platform. I canned it once I realized how hard privacy issues would make its adoption. Good luck.

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