A lot of the coolness requires a critical mass. The idea is usually being a standard, being Apple supported, or being included in Android provides that...in practice, that hasn't been true.

I look enviously at other countries that have been using feature phones for banking and p2p banking. The video of a guy in China assembling his own iPhone shows QR codes at each booth used for payment. There's no reason Smart Phones or NFC could do those things better, but we still don't have it and it won't be happening in the U.S. in near future.

Actually, interestingly, QR codes can be better for some payment scenarios than NFC. I live in China and I can go to my local corner shop, pick up a bottle from the fridge, and even if there's a queue at the register I can scan the code from a distance, pay and leave with a nod from the shop keeper.

QR codes are also used for exchanging contact information... when I give a talk in China, I put my Wechat QR code at the end so any member of the audience can scan it from the slide for follow-up conversations.

Perhaps not coincidentally then, Apple is providing native support for QR codes in the Camera app in IOS 11.

They specifically mentioned it on the slide of things that they were adding for China as well.

> I put my Wechat QR code at the end so any member of the audience can scan it from the slide

I've always been surprised by this (and even more by QR codes in magazine ads and billboards). I'd think that these days, for 90% of applications a regular URL should work. Just as your photo app thee days marks (and often labels) the faces, it could simply highlight all the URLs, email addresses etc in the image and let you click on them.

Yes, QR codes are more robust (at the cost of a small payload for a large image) but I suspect in most cases it's unnecessary.

QR Codes do work rather well actually in different contexts, they are very robust. Upside down, from across the room, weird lighting... Also, in the Chinese context, everybody knows what to do with it and what to expect to happen if they scan it.

The farmer coming into the city on a trike selling fruit even accepts payment by QR code :)

I completely agree, especially on roadside billboards. URLs have the excellent advantage of supporting 'human storage' - i can remember a URL and try it later. QR codes, not so much.

QR codes are cheaper, but NFC tags are more convenient. QR code are typically also all the same on a given label, where NFC can be programmed to have a unique id for each relatively simple.

QR codes support multiple devices at the same time, and have much larger range for reading (limited by the physical display size). Unique ID's can be built into the app reading the QR code for things like payment transactions. If I control the app reading the QR code (like WeChat), I can easily add state and add some "ping-back" behaviour to ID who/what/where the scan happened.

I think you misunderstood. I never talked about ping back or anything like it. For that, both are exactly the same. I was purely talking about how it scales when you need to identify each item individually, for instance library books. But it wasn't exactly clearly communicated, my bad.

For inventory management, it's preferable that each item has its own unique code. So either you need to print a different QR code for every item, or you put on an NFC chip.

It is true that QR codes are supported on more devices, but that is because cameras and screens are ubiquitous with smart phones. An NFC reader is cheaper.

I'm not convinced that it'd be any harder or more expensive to print a series of unique QR codes onto objects than to use NFC chips.

The heavy use of (granted, not strictly QR) 2D barcodes in physical mail/shipping suggests it's both useful and cost effective.

Indeed, but they are already printing a label for every parcel, and they used barcodes long before NFC tags was a thing. They already have hardware and tooling in place for it, so unless NFC will save them a significant amount of money it makes no sense to switch.

Think of a stockroom. When you get new inventory, you put on an NFC tag on every item, and then you have to register each which is just one sweep. With QR/barcodes you either have to register and then print and put on the items, or you have to scan each individually after.

Both NFC and QR have strengths and weaknesses. I'm certain that we will see both utilized more and more.

Beacons a) aren't Apple exclusive b) are really cool.

The trouble is that the category of features they solve can often also be solved by GPS, Network, or other similar technologies.

There are a myriad of cool things that Bluetooth Beacons can do but none of them are particularly consumer must-haves.

Might be off-topic, but anyone know what other techs provide indoor distance tacking/localization other than BLE beacons? WIFI's accuracy is too low.

There are very promising "ultrawideband" solutions (allowing distance to be determined from time of flight of a message rather than signal strength) but the use cases are limited as there is no existing infrastructure. The best that can be done on phones is "sensor fusion" from all available sensors (including wifi and BLE, also integration of motion data) but it requires very extensive mapping of the location in advance. iOS suppports this since a few releases ago but only for locations that have been mapped by Apple so the use cases are rather limited, presumably the mall/airport feature just shown used it.

I worked at a consulting company about a decade ago that designed an indoor tracking system. It could track a device to within a meter, and that was no trivial undertaking. I always have a laugh when I see some startup making a child tracker/pet tracker using iBeacon. You need a large array of radios to track the beacons, you have to model the physics of the building's construction (absorption, Rayleigh scattering, etc), account for multiple floors, and come up with a working algorithm that combines all the RSSI readings to produce a precise location.

It's not all that hard with RFID and the right antenna. It's done extensively in facilities with expensive equipment like refineries.

If you helped implement that system, I'd like to know more.

iBeacon protocol is not proprietory. BLE covers larger area that NFC does not.

I agree there aren't much real uses tho. But we might not know yet.

For example LoRaWAN networks are deployed worldwide fairly quietly.

I am using iBeacons so that my automation knows what room I am in my apartment. I plan on doing 3d positioning with them eventually.

I built an app for the world-leading led-manufacturer. They have underwater-lightbulbs and tag them with NFC for servicing and tracking. They seal the tag in with the led inside the casing.