Fresh Talk #14 Beacons State of the Union

This time, we have invited one of the regulars to our meeting to share insights within his own field of expertise - beacons. Beacons are Bluetooth devices that broadcast small packets of data to other devices around them, "guiding" these devices throughout the physical space ... like a lighthouse that "broadcasts" its presence to the ships around. It's now been more than 2 years since Apple brought beacons support natively into iOS, with their iBeacon technology. And Google has just entered the beacon scene too--earlier this year, they announced their own beacon protocol, Eddystone, and also that they'll be adding beacon support to their apps in the coming future, starting with Chrome on iOS (which is live already). So what is the state of the beacon technology today? Where is it going? What are the key promises it offers, and the challenges that still trouble it? We'll try to get the bottom of all that.