| Our decision to go down the B2B route rather than the B2C route is predominately two fold: - We think the product works better as a solution in the B2B space. - At the moment we only really have the resources to focus on one product. At some point through I'd really like for us to have a B2C offering but realistically it won't be for a while - sorry! "there doesn't seem to be (and should be) some sort of proximity tech based on roundtrip time -- make it beep rapidly as roundtrip time gets shorter (waiting for massive comments about why this doesn't necessarily indicate proximity)" To be fair to Tile, this is a limitation of BLE and the hardware on phones. Measuring round trip time would require hardware support on the phone and probably a much more expensive tracker. Instead what is available is RSSI or received signal strength indicator. It's an ok measurement but suffers from: - Multi path, signals being reflected and arriving from different directions - Antenna that aren't perfectly omni directional - Signal absorption e.g. large bodies of water (usually people) not being great at letting signals go through them. That said the new BLE 5.1 standard ratified at the beginning of this year provides angle of arrival and or angle or departure for bluetooth signals so you can tell which direction a bluetooth signal is coming from. We're eagerly waiting to find out if it will be supported on smartphones as it's an optional part of the specification and requires additional hardware. Honestly though it's a long shot - getting one antenna working well on a smartphone is difficult. Getting 4 (which 5.1 A0A requires) may end up being too difficult / not worth it for smartphone manufacturers. |
Regarding BLE -- is that really a limitation though? Even if the hardware / API won't give you a good indication of signal strength, surely there is nothing stopping you from taking a timestamp, sending a packet to the BT device, taking a second timestamp when the response arrives from the device, and using t2 - t1 to measure "strength"? There are papers on how people have been able to triangulate a physical location based on three ping times -- this seems a lot simpler as it's the 1-D version of that problem. Worst case scenario you need a nano-second precision clock, but the principle should still work.