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.
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.