Show HN: Beaconstac – iBeacon proximity platform for developers

Show HN: Beaconstac – iBeacon proximity platform for developers(developer.beaconstac.com)

26 points by bhashkarsharma 11 years ago | 5 comments

sritch 11 years ago |

A lot of hardware manufacturers offer their own SDKs for interacting with their beacons, not letting you get the UUID of the beacon itself. Are you interacting with all providers' SDKs?

ravipratapm 11 years ago | |

Hardware manufacturers generally offer SDKs that allow you to gather specific data from the beacon's sensors that are not part of the iBeacon spec (and therefore not captured by iOS CoreLocation, for e.g.)

The iBeacon spec requires the UUID to be transmitted with each BLE packet so there's no way to hide the UUID of the beacon (you should be able to get it using a simple BLE scan).

Beaconstac currently does not support those providers that are not compliant with the iBeacon spec. We don't integrate with any custom beacon manufacturer SDKs.

ksaxena 11 years ago |

Cool stuff guys. Quick question: how much of an adoption are you expecting for iBeacon compliant stuff in say, the next 2 years amongst small and medium retailers? Or is it more of a large retail play?

ravipratapm 11 years ago | |

Glad you like it!

From what we're seeing, there's very clear interest in beacons across a wide variety of verticals - hotels, events, museums, etc. Retail is definitely one of the significant verticals but not the only one.

That's also one of the reasons Beaconstac is a developer-led platform with SDKs & REST APIs - we think it is best to let developers figure out how to add proximity-based applications to the verticals they work in.

pothash 11 years ago | |

For starters, we expect this to be more geared towards larger players, since we the business needs to invest in an app. Having said that the use-cases for beacons definitely go beyond just retail across various industry verticals and we expect this to be driven by developers.