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Comment by sassal | Hacker News Reader

This looks incredible. They've taken the fact that people will scroll through their Facebook feeds when sitting at a cafe or shopping at a retail store and monetized it! Also, if they were to integrate push notifications for every time you walked into a store to inform people of your specials that could work great.

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> Also, if they were to integrate push notifications for every time you walked into a store to inform people of your specials that could work great.

That, I guess, would kill it, were it enabled by default or not easily turned off. Some people may like being shoved ads in their faces, but others hate it. I personally would happily switch to another store if they were to start push-spamming me.

I don't really get why you need to have a beacon for this though? The Facebook app is already installed and knows your location anyway. Provide businesses with a page to enter the details to be pushed to the phone and then just let the app pop up a notification once the user enters the associated geofence.

If the location is not accurate enough, you can tie it to a Wifi point of the business (the Wifi doesn't even need to be open). And it doesn't need to use Bluetooth at all (which I always leave off on all my phones until I really need it as it consumes a lot of battery).

Given the fact that the Facebook app is already installed anyway on literally any phone, they could pull this off right away. This is what Foursquare should have done years ago to survive.

I think you might underestimate how big is the error in the normal (wifi) location sensing (e.g. see here[1]). Bluetooth beacons add a much more localized spot, so much less likely to pop up the wrong place on your device, which is very important for this to be any real use.

[1]: https://gigaom.com/2012/08/17/how-much-better-is-gps-over-wi...

Exactly. GPS could probably work well enough in suburbs and other areas with fairly wide spaced buildings, but in a urban environment there could easily be ten or more businesses within the margin of error for GPS location detection.

Yup, that might be... though theoretically it might be possible to calibrate this in a more fine tuned manner if you know/have access to the WiFi hot spot/box beforehand.

Not all businesses have Wifi. Does an out of the box equivalent of iBeacon for Wifi exist? I'd be interested if you know of one.

Sure, buy an AP and just let it sit there unconnected. As soon as a few smartphones with their Wifi and GPS turned on pass by it, its position will make part of location databases and be used by smartphones to locate themselves.

I meant one that's as accessible to use out of the box like an iBeacon or this new fangled FB beacon, but with Wifi instead of BLE.

I'm not saying one doesn't exist. I'm genuinely curious whether one does.

That's what I'm saying: any Wifi AP is usable out of the box. Just plug it to a power socket, and it'll start broadcasting beacon packets that smartphones can use to geolocate, just like with iBeacon. You don't need to do anything.

Understood. I meant one geared at non-technical people. More of a plug it in and data starts being collected and pushed.

But iBeacon doesn't collect any data. It does exactly the same as an WiFi AP - continually sends beacons to local listeners.

In both cases, it's the client device (smartphone, tablet, etc) that's doing the collecting.

Ah ok, got it. Thanks!

How is it monetized? The beacon is free to the business, the customer doesn't pay Facebook to view the business's page.

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