Some things bother us. One such thing is platform providers saying beacons send content to phones. People contacting us expect this to happen (without an app) and we end up spending a lot of time explaining how it really works. Now Live Beacon on Kickstarter is saying something similar…
Live Beacon is a small, battery-powered, cloud-controlled device that transmits web content and notifications to nearby smartphones.
This isn’t strictly true and we expect there might be a few disappointed users when they get their beacons. The beacon doesn’t send content to phones, it sends an id (or URL) that the Live Beacon app uses to get content from a server. It doesn’t work without an app. It’s a subtle difference but one that means you need to somehow get the Live Beacon app on to users’ phones.
We are not saying you shouldn’t support Live Beacon – especially if it’s as easy to configure as they claim. Their USP is in their software. A free portal where you can configure your content AND beacons is worth having. It’s just that they might be heading for some fallout if people end up expecting it to magically work without the app.
The only beacon that does sent content is Google’s experimental FatBeacon.