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Comment by aflinik | Hacker News Reader

(Disclaimer: I work for Estimote) Indoor location works much better if you utilize data from other sensors in the phone (like accelerometer etc) and apply machine learning to make better sense out of all the signals. I'd suggest you take a look at our SDK that works surprisingly well even with just 4-5 beacons. You can also map your room with our iOS app by just walking around it. You can find it here if you're interested: http://estimote.com/indoor/

We've also implemented some adaptive algorithms to optimize the battery life in our beacons, so with conservative settings they should work for 5+ years now.

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The beacons my company received from you guys must have been out of the norm then. All 3 Estimote beacons are dead, and they all died around the same time (one in super conservative mode, one in what should be a normal use case, and then one in max power mode).

I was excited when I saw your indoor SDK, but it's too simplistic and not realistic enough for the production apps we have and are building (walking around and mapping every single room in a hospital is untenable).

I don't mean to bash your company at all here, so I'm sorry if this comes off that way. I also found that almost all clients scoff at ~$33/beacon when you're pitching something in the 10,000 beacon range. Even then, for $30/beacon I can get ones that run off the wall circuit and last until that's off (for all intents and purposes, longer than 5 years).

Obviously at 10,000 beacons we're talking enterprise pricing, but even if you were to get that to around $5 that's still too much for what's essentially a CR2032 battery and a tiny radio chip.

I'm excited to see where Estimote takes beacons though, since they seem to be doing the most R&D type pushes with this technology compared to the other manufacturers.

Thanks for your feedback! Sorry to hear about faulty beacons, what happened definitely doesn't sound normal. I'd suggest to contact our community team at contact@estimote.com and they're probably able to replace these beacons with new ones.

Indoor SDK is still in very early phase, but we're pushing very hard to roll out a series of updates with new features like multiple rooms support, cloud integration and even better accuracy, so you can expect more comprehensive solution in the near future.

And if you're interested in bigger deployments we also offer beacons in bulk quantities with much better pricing.

We're treating R&D very seriously as we're thinking of beacons as much more than simply hardware. There's still a lot of ideas to explore and we try to support the community as much as we can, so I hope you'll give it another chance.

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts. That's extremely important to us and makes it possible to address issues people have with beacon technology ASAP

Yeah no problem, I'll talk to my director at work to reach out about the beacons since he's been the point of contact with Estimote so far. Thanks for following up and fielding my concerns/criticism. Like I said earlier, I honestly can't wait to see what you guys come out with next in advancing this technology.

(Disclaimer: Work at TAH) I totally agree to what you are saying. We have had a similar experience working with our devices and SDK.

http://tah.io/get

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