There are several companies that make these little BTLE “tags” that can be used for proximity detection.
Some are passive (unpowered) and some are more active and require power. TrackR Bravo has small quarter-sized devices that are only as large as they are because of the battery in them. They last for a year. EveryKey has little rectangular devices that have LiPo batteries in them that need to be recharged weekly. The interesting thing is that from a functional standpoint, they’re pretty much both doing the same thing. The difference is in the applications. TrackR’s business model is this: stick our tags on your stuff and you’ll be able to find them esily if you lose any of them. EveryKey’s business model is similar: stick one of our tags on yourself and you’ll be able to automatically log into any of your devices when you get within range of them. Both are dependent on people running their app for their model to work. TrackR’s model requires the world to be using their app, but EveryKey’s only requires the equipment owner to be using their app. They’re the same proximity mechanisms at work, but opposite approaches that lead to different use cases. They could probably be done with passive tags as well. These are both closed models — you have to use their software with their devices. If you want to be able to, say, login to another app using EveryKey, you need to wait for them to build that in. Are there any open-source tools or libraries where people are building similar types of apps that work with any number of different types of tags? -David Schwartz
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