Apple's iBeacon Technology Featured in CES Scavenger Hunt

[derbladerunner]

Doubtful. It seems painfully clear that the commenter never stated that the iphone supported NFC, since all he offered was iBeacons as a speculative alternative to NFC. "iBeacons could also be used for payments in the future, especially for recurring payments like beverages at Starbucks, instead of NFC." Since, ya know, NFC is currently a common payment method not supported on the iphone, whereas iBeacons potentially could be.

Exactly, I never wrote NFC was used by Apple. NFC is used/proposed by other companies for transactions, Google comes to mind (but NFC didn't gain a lot of traction in retail so far, especially not on smartphones, except for a few special use cases like metro cards in Asia).

Still, many people wondered why Apple didn't add NFC chips to its tablets and smartphones.

iBeacons may be part of the answer why Apple didn't add NFC. While iBeacons is mainly used to push information in current trials, it could also be used for payments at the counter in the future (competing with NFC and other solutions).

I think iBeacons has huge potential since it's supported on iPhones as old as the 4s.

 

[derbladerunner]

One more thing: The long-term potential of Touch ID + iBeacons shouldn't be underestimated.

While Apple probably won't allow third parties to access Touch ID (they said so iirc) they could allow access for two of their own applications:

The Passbook app and a future central payments app.

Maybe Apple is waiting for more Touch ID devices to be sold before they launch a payment solution using iBeacons in late 2014-2015. Just speculation on my part...

 

[darwen]

Did anyone try this and have success? I had the app installed, and I spent a great deal of time walking the floor, but I didn't trigger a single badge. Every time I went to check if I had one, it asked me if I wanted to "start" the scavenger hunt. I'm not even sure if it was running.

That app was terrible. I think they sent about 100 push notifications over just a few days.