Facebook Tests Bluetooth ‘Beacons’ to Feed Users Local Content

> How is it better than [...] phone's native location capabilities?

That's what it is. The beacon doesn't transmit any data, only a serial number. This serial is used to get the relevant data over the internet.

The beacons work indoors, and have a potentially better accuracy than wifi geolocation. It is also simple to tie to a speciffic service.

I can imagine two unmentioned scenarios that would be useful for a business, so far.

One is the food truck biz model and trade shows, maker fair, state fair type events. Assuming the fad hangs on long enough, I suspect every "work truck" in the country could end up with a spam transmitter, so if a neighbor hires a plumber the neighbors will all be spammed while the plumber truck is on site.

The other is playing weird games with powering the beacon off the same power strip or wall outlet as the "Open" sign, on the theory that spamming people when you're not even open isn't nice. So, open for business, out flows the spam, closed for whatever reason, off goes the spam.

Of course spamming people isn't nice, regardless of being mobile or open, so the primary user interaction will be shutting off beacon spam, much like the only interaction I have with notifications on my phone is shutting off spammy apps so I don't have to ever see a notification again from that app. You get to sell one ad, once.

A phone's native location capabilities (as they are currently) are limited to GPS pretty much - which is often insufficient for figuring out if a customer is inside the JC Penny or Macy's in a large shopping mall

Even better (for stores), they want to be able to see if you are walking past the Men's Shirts section and perhaps send you a notification that the specific shirt you were looking for in the past is now on sale - thus individualized local content!

For more, see things like Estimote: http://estimote.com/

Why? Can you elaborate on why this would be a bad thing for your uses?