any ETA for the launch?
Still hoping for end of this year or early the next.
Will this still require the use of gateways / re-transmitters?
Yes, however the first version will not be able to do full mesh networks. The tiny battery is not strong enough to keep it running and retransmitting all day, so it will only transmit and receive transactions when it's on.
I love this project but get creeped the hell out by the consumer tracking "features" in this video:
It creeps me out too, but there is nothing you can do if you have a device that transmits radio, and someone else uses a radio scanner that scans for unique signals. It doesn't matter if that radio is our Bitcoincard, your cell phone, your Bluetooth device, or even an NFC chip in your credit card. Best you can do is not associate your real identity with the number associated with your radio (like you don't associate your bitcoin addresses with your identity). I don't know if we are even still planning this feature, since the video was made over two years ago, and A LOT has changed since then, both in bitcoin and with our device (which looks nothing like the one in the video, check out mycelium.com), but if this technology is pretty much inevitable, anyway, then I'd rather it be us that controls what comes out eventually (we're very much against government snooping, as you can probably tell by the features were already have, and plan to implement, into our app).