Hi Kevin,

There is a lot of valid concerns in your article and I think it’s great to emphasise them from time to time. It will motivate all companies involved to solve this issues by pushing technology further.

Bluetooth is not that good indeed. There is a lot of cases where it won’t work at all. There is a lot of the cases it will thought and we need to remember about it. At Estimote we see a lot of successful project where it works great (Guggenheim is one of examples). The ones with bad experience are more vocal in the internet. That’s the reason you can have feeling that it is truly horrible.

The key with Blueooth LE is it’s low power capabilities combined with great penetration in mobile devices. It potentialy allows us to connect with huge amout of clients that can validate our ideas. I believe we are in prototype phase now and that’s how we should treat the ideas appearing on the market. Any working prototype giving value to the users push us further and puts more energy into making the technology better. I deeply believe that bluetooth is going to strongly evolve and solve all this technological problems.

The development of beacons technology is slowly solving another issue you’ve mentioned that is app availability. Check out recent Google I/O announcements (I’ve wrote about them here). Thanks to The Physical Web project and Instant Apps the border between apps and web is blurring. User experience benefits from deeper OS beacons integration. Companies like Apple and Google can do a lot to improve magical moments you can deliver with bluetooth.

Best regards,

Marcin Klimek