I think this is a very positive development. In the end, Internet.org and Airtel Zero are not very different in their scant regard for net neutrality.
It's also indicative of just how huge the public debate has become. Indian companies (and the media) have had to very publicly retract on their earlier stand on the issue.
Hardware manufacturers generally offer SDKs that allow you to gather specific data from the beacon's sensors that are not part of the iBeacon spec (and therefore not captured by iOS CoreLocation, for e.g.)
The iBeacon spec requires the UUID to be transmitted with each BLE packet so there's no way to hide the UUID of the beacon (you should be able to get it using a simple BLE scan).
Beaconstac currently does not support those providers that are not compliant with the iBeacon spec. We don't integrate with any custom beacon manufacturer SDKs.
From what we're seeing, there's very clear interest in beacons across a wide variety of verticals - hotels, events, museums, etc. Retail is definitely one of the significant verticals but not the only one.
That's also one of the reasons Beaconstac is a developer-led platform with SDKs & REST APIs - we think it is best to let developers figure out how to add proximity-based applications to the verticals they work in.
HTML5stac provides the complete backend, including the models and REST APIs to go with it. And it's full-stack JavaScript too, both on the client and server.
The demo app does in fact using Backbone+Bootstrap.
What HTML5stac makes dead simple for you is mapping your backend data models to Backbone Collections. In addition, we have responsive images, and adaptive templates, built into the framework.
Do you mind elaborating why JavaScript should have nothing to do with it?
IMO responsiveness is a broad approach, and it doesn't necessarily imply only a pure CSS3 approach using media queries. If using JavaScript can make the web app more "responsive" to user needs, what's wrong with that?
Apologies, we ran into rate limits that we had applied on our server so the experience was very poor when you hit it (we really didn't expect HN to pick it up!)
You're right that there are too many requests being made. We're fixing this very soon, stay tuned.
Thanks for your feedback - we're in a early private beta and your inputs are very valuable to us.