Hasta La Gadget!

BitLock is a smart lock for your bike that uses Bluetooth LE/4.0 to do away with physical keys — allowing you to lock and unlock your ride based on the proximity of your smartphone to your bike (or directly within the app). The device exists in prototype form only for now, as its San Francisco-based makers are seeking $120,000 on Kickstarter to go into production.

As with similar smart lock concepts for the home — such as Lockitron — there are more advantages to ditching metal keys and going for software than having one less key to carry around with you: BitLock’s system means you can tap into the sharing economy by sharing access to your bike with others, provisioning and revoking digital keys as you see fit.

The app will also let you view the location where you last locked up your bike on a map (based on recording your smartphone’s GPS at the time), and get maps of your rides and activity data — such as average speed, distance pedalled and estimated calories burnt. Bundling lots of handy functions in one.

Best of all: BitLock’s battery life is apparently good for five years’ average use (based on five lock/unlock operations per day), thanks to the low-energy requirements of Bluetooth 4.0 and a Lithium thionyl chloride (Li-SOCl 2) battery. In London at least, it’s far more likely that your bike will get lifted long before the battery runs out.

On the theft/security front, BitLock’s makers claim the lock’s reinforced, heat-treated and cut-resistant steel “cannot be defeated using any kind of bolt cutter or hacksaw”. While the digital keys are covered by banking-grade encryption. The lock is also designed to resist the weather, with internal electronics sealed and waterproofed and able to operate “under an extended temperature range”.

What about if you lose your phone? Access to your bike can be disabled by resetting your account password. And if you want to unlock your bike when you’re without your phone (or if its battery has run out) BitLock has a couple of contingencies: one being a 16 digit binary code (that can be generated when you register the lock) to use to unlock the device. “Write down the code on a piece of paper, and keep it in your wallet,” they suggest.

Or there’s the cloud route — meaning you’ll just need to borrow someone else’s smartphone or use another Bluetooth 4.0 device and then log into your BitLock account to be able to unlock your bike.

Current devices compatible with BitLock include the iPhone 4S (or newer) on the iPhone side, and on Android there’s a clutch of compatible phones including the Samsung Galaxy S3, S4, Note 2 & Note 3; the HTC One; Google’s Nexus 4 & 5; and Motorola Moto X (and others). Expect more to be added to that list by the time BitLock makes it to market — with close to a year to wait til shipping date — assuming it hits its funding goal.

BitLock looks to be on track to hit its funding goal — although it’s still a ways off, it’s raised close to $41,000+ of the $120k target with 28 days left to run on the campaign.

How much is BitLock going to set you back? There’s a handful of early bird $79 Kickstarter pledge levels left to get a lock, with an estimated shipping date of July 2014. Once those are gone the price rises to $99.

There’s been plenty of buzz about iBeacons and Bluetooth Low Energy radios — they’re supposed to do wonders for in-venue positioning, and plenty of companies have already expressed interest in deploying them in the field. But what is it like to actually stroll through a beacon-laden area? Curiously enough, Major League Baseball took on that challenge and recently decided to show off its vision of a Bluetooth-enabled ballpark at Citi Field in Queens, NY.

“What we’re moving toward is building a platform for any team to put their own custom Bluetooth beacons in their parks,” said MLB Mobile Product Dev SVP Chad Evans as he clutched his iPhone outside the venue.

Let’s be clear about something first: Very little about MLB’s big Bluetooth push is final at this point. It almost seemed that, with this experiment, MLB’s tech team was thinking out loud. A handsomely revamped version of the MLB At Bat app is perhaps the furthest along. Evans says the design language of the app, which now features a seemingly Googlean stream of cards that display your ticket barcode and seat locations (among other things) is near final and will roll out to consumers in the coming months. The visual polish of the software was balanced by the unfinished nature of the hardware that made all those whiz-bang features possible. At this stage it’s all prototype gear, small boards lashed together and housed in milky-white plastic cases to protect them from the elements.

With all that said, MLB’s little experiment shows plenty of promise. Walking across the threshold into the park proper prompted a notification on Evans’ demo iPhone welcoming us to the venue. Stopping in front of the old Shea Stadium Home Run Apple and holding that same phone to a demo stanchion kicked off a video that described the Mets’ home for 44 years. Once we passed into the park’s rotunda and paused in front of the escalator, the app recognized us as a first-time visitor and offered us $2 off a Nathan’s hot dog. Eventually, Evans said, the app and those Bluetooth beacons will be able to direct users to the closest route to their seats.

One has to wonder how much further MLB could take this concept. If you could track app users as they bounded from location to location in a ballpark, you could probably develop a pretty granular profile to help target for ads or other engagement opportunities. Repeat visitor to the Mets Team Store? You could get pushed a loyalty discount. Were you spotted making more than a few trips to the bathroom? Maybe you shouldn’t be pushed any more drink specials. Granted, the second example is pretty extreme, but Evans didn’t completely rule out the possibility of more fine-grained location sniffing… if the organization can figure out how to accomplish that sort of thing without creeping out the fans.

How far could MLB take the concept?

Once you start seeing what MLB (and plenty of other organizations like it) can do with iBeacons, it makes sense why Bluetooth Low Energy is suddenly so in vogue. The level of targeting and reach that a smartly assembled array of Bluetooth beacons provides could profoundly change how companies try to interact with us for better or worse. It certainly doesn’t hurt that support for Bluetooth LE is something both Apple and Google have committed to either — iDevices as old as the 4S can take advantage of these features if they’re running iOS 7, and Google confirmed that Bluetooth LE support would be one of the main additions to Android 4.3. That means a huge swath of the devices out there and in the pipeline will be ready to, well, play ball with this newfangled approach to interaction.

Evans admitted that MLB has explored a few other location-based content delivery systems in the past, but solutions like NFC’s stop-and-tap-and-wait approach never reached the level of ubiquity and reliability to make it worth a major rollout. Even platform-agnostic modes of interaction like scanning QR codes and AR applications apparently just weren’t elegant enough to get the job done. But with iBeacons, MLB may have finally found exactly what it’s looking for.

For now, though, the name of the game is fine-tuning. Evans noted these Bluetooth-powered experiences will start rolling out sometime in 2014, but it’ll be some time before the functionality spreads to the rest of the nation’s major league ballparks. After all, there’s a lot to consider when it comes to crafting a smart location-centric experience like the one demoed on that warm September afternoon. Part of the plan, naturally, has to encompass the sorts of content that users are given access to, but there are plenty of technical concerns to tackle, too.

Consider the issue of range, for one. MLB doesn’t want to accidentally trigger a response within the app if you’re too far away from an attraction or a point of interest. Even the materials used in the construction of the park can affect these radios’ reach, so each one has to have its power output and transmission rate tweaked so they can collectively hit the right spots. You can bet that Fenway Park — opened in 1912 and festooned with architectural holdovers from years past — is going to require a significantly different layout of Bluetooth transmitters than my native Citizens Bank Park (go Phils!).

If this sounds like a painstaking process, you’d be right, but Evans is convinced that taking the time to meticulously hone the hardware is well worth it.

“We’re baseball, we’re not a small startup,” Evans conceded. “We want to be nimble and quick and take new opportunities, but we also don’t want to roll something out that’s going to confuse fans.”