This is a guest post by Frederic Schroyens from The Reference digital agency

Elegy for forgotten sounds is an art installation at the Concert Hall of Bruges commemorating World War I. It allows visitors to experience the cacophony of WWI’s battlefield, using no more than timpani sticks and Estimote Beacons. This post describes our path to developing it, issues we experienced along the way, and how we solved them.

The image below gives an impression of the setup–the installation is placed in the center of the room. There’s a lot of technology hidden inside: an iPhone, Intel Edison units, speakers, audio control panel, and even a smoke machine. The board contains five timpani sticks. Each stick has two Estimote Beacons inside and is “charged” with a different set of sounds. All sounds are designed to evoke an impression of WWI battlefield.

The experience is as follows: people choose a stick and start moving around the room. The audio behavior triggered by the system will create a WWI soundscape. It’s even possible to trigger smoke with the right combination of sticks. The area surrounding the installation is divided into three invisible zones, each of them approximately 2 meters wide. The technology inside the central installation keeps track of the sticks and also checks which zone the sticks are in. Ultimately, the combination of sticks and zones determine the audio playback and volume.

The installation uses a total of ten beacons, placed in five timpani sticks. Each pair of beacons are combined at a 90-degree angle to provide the best possible signal quality. Both beacons are used for distance tracking, but one of them also employs Motion UUID, which is responsible for motion detection.

Figure 1. A conceptual drawing of the installation zones.

Challenges

At the same time, creating a beacon deployment like this one poses some difficulties: iOS limitations, signal interference, and Bluetooth behavior make it hard to receive consistent RSSI readings. In most situations it is enough to detect the presence of the user within the beacon’s range. In our case we also needed to know the approximate position of the stick almost in real-time. An unstable or slow signal can disrupt the application flow which will be audible for the users.

At first it seems simple enough to use the Estimote SDK and listen to the distance updates. Unfortunately, this approach has some drawbacks. First, iOS limits the beacon update speed to one update per second. However, this is too slow when you need real-time distance tracking.

One alternative would have been to implement the tracking part of the application on Android, which does not have this limitation. We tried this approach by tracking the beacons on Android and passing the data to iPhone over Bluetooth. Unfortunately, while this improved the tracking speed, the signal was still jumping around a lot due to interference in the room.

Interference causes the RSSI of the beacon signal to jump all over the place. Zone switches would often occur even when standing completely still, because the RSSI value can randomly jump 5dB in an instant.

We couldn’t get rid of the interference in the building, but we did come up with some steps to reduce its impact on our app.

Tracking with Intel Edison

Simple presence detection works well enough with an iPhone, but it’s not enough when you need real-time distance information like we did. The update speed is too slow and there’s nothing to do about interference. Theoretically, a larger Bluetooth antenna would help, but one can’t just add one to the iPhone!

If you’re not familiar with the Intel Edison, it’s a computer about the size of a credit card running Yocto Linux. It comes with Bluetooth 4.0 support and you can attach an external antenna with a coax cable.

To cover as many approach angles as possible, we configured three Intel Edisons and placed them in a triangular shape around the installation. Each Edison has an external antenna attached to receive a tremendous amount of Bluetooth signal from the beacons. We tested seven different antennas, but eventually settled on the ANT-24G-WHJ-SMA which gave us the most consistent results.

The job of the Edisons is quite simple. They set up a Bluetooth connection with the iPhone and then start capturing the Estimote RSSI broadcast values; then they process those values and pass them to the iPhone. Thanks to the Edisons, the maximum range of the beacons is strongly extended and the signal is far more stable.

An entire explanation of the code running on the Edisons would make this blog post too long, but their configuration looks as follows:

• A system.d script launches the program at boot and restarts it in case of a crash
• The program itself is written in C and uses the Linux BlueZ stack to set up Bluetooth connections. The program will capture the RSSI of all beacons with a major in the 600 range. It will then perform a weighted rolling average on the values received, using the following steps:
• Take the average RSSI value of the last five values as the new rolling average
• Take the weighted average of the last rolling average and the new one, whereby it attaches a bit more weight to the old value
• Compare the received value to that of the ’sibling’ beacon and check which one has the best (lowest) value. If the value is different from the last value sent to the iPhone, the new value is sent. This helps to smooth the readings and avoid any sudden jumps in the RSSI signal

Remember that each stick contains two beacons and we’re looking for the best value of the two. So after we calculate and smooth out the RSSI value, we compare the values between sibling beacons and send the better one.

Edisons send data to the iPhone in the following format:

INTEL_EDISON_ID|STICK_MAJOR|VALUE

So for example, the iPhone will receive: 3|610|48

Note that we send the stick’s major ID and not the beacon’s major ID. This is because the beacon’s major is only relevant to the Edisons, but as far as the iPhone is concerned, there are only 5 beacons (sticks) involved. Therefore, the Edison will map the majors of each pair of beacons to the major of the corresponding stick as the iPhone expects them. So beacon majors 600 and 610 become stick major 600, and beacon majors 620 and 630 become stick major 610, etc.

Applying weighted rolling average X2

The first round of weighted rolling average described above occurs on the Edisons. The iPhone will run a second round once it receives data from one of the Edisons.

The iPhone contains a dictionary in which it keeps the last received value from each Edison for each stick. Upon receiving a new value, the iPhone will check the ID of the Edison that sent it and then store it at the appropriate place in the dictionary.

It will then take each value in the dictionary and calculate the best one. In other words, this is the lowest RSSI value received from one of the Edisons. This value is then stored in the list of last five ’best’ values for the stick.

The second round of weighted rolling average is then executed on those values. The outcome of this round is the final value that will be used in the application flow. The entire process will repeat itself every time a new RSSI value is received. Because the beacons are configured with an advertising interval of 200 ms this flow will occur approximately five times per second.

Figure 2. The green line displays the effect of signal smoothing applied to the distance returned by the Estimote SDK.

Setting up ’dynamic’ zone borders

The above steps work well to keep a fairly smooth and continuous feed of RSSI readings. However, it does not yet stop our zones from switching back and forth if a user happens to stand near the edge.

For example, if the near/close zone border is defined by RSSI value of 50 dBm, with near < 50 dBm and close >= 50 dBm and the current RSSI value is 49 dBm, then a 1 dBm fluctuation will trigger a switch. Since RSSI is never completely stable, this can occur often.

To mitigate the problem, we implemented ‘dynamic’ zone borders. The zone border is essentially “moved” a few dBms in the opposite direction after the user crosses it. As an example, imagine the near/close border is defined at 50 dBm and the user crosses from near to close. The moment the user enters the close zone, the required RSSI threshold for going back into the near zone is reduced by 2 dBm (thus 48 dBm). If RSSI now jumps by 1 or 2 dBms, it’s not a problem. It will still be greater than 48 dBm and the user will remain in the close zone. Moving back from close to near works the same way. The new border of 48 dBm will be moved back to 50 dBm. Note that the border only changes for the particular stick that crossed it. Thus at any given moment sticks can have different values for the zone borders.

The exact values with which to update each border is gained from a lot of of trial and error. We don’t use an offset of 2 dBm everywhere and in every direction, but the concept generally works pretty well for our purposes.

Using motion detection to detect unused sticks

One problem still remains. When sticks are placed on the board they should not be part of the application flow. But if an unstable signal suddenly causes an RSSI spike, the stick may jump into one of the zones and trigger audio playback. The further the beacon, the less stable its signal, so this was a regular occurrence.

The solution for us was to combine the distance tracking with motion detection. The motion detection is implemented using the Estimote SDK on the iPhone itself and does not use the Intel Edisons. If a stick doesn’t move (so when it’s placed on the board) we consider it to be out of range. The iPhone will simply ignore all updates from sticks that are motionless. This will also cause the sound to go quiet if the user keeps the stick very still, which turned out to be an interesting side effect in our case.

With all of the above measures, the installation works pretty well though not completely flawless. All the smoothing in the world won’t help if a beacon’s signal suddenly jumps 10 dBms and remains there for the next 10 seconds. But the behavior is generally consistent. Actually, it’s reliable enough for us to implement dynamic volume (the audio volume changes with the user’s distance in the close range).

We suggest starting with the Estimote SDK alongside Estimote Beacons–it allowed us to quickly set up basic tracking so we could focus on the application and flow logic first. Only afterwards did we move towards improving the signal by switching to the Intel Edison setup. And depending on the location where you will deploy your beacons, simply tracking with iPhone may already work well enough.

Frederic Schroyens, Head of Mobile & Tablets at The Reference

In the first year after its release there was a narrative around Apple iBeacon that public deployments weren’t progressing at lightning speed like some people were expecting when the framework launched. After all, Apple is famous for beautiful devices with perfect rounded corners that immediately bring magic to our lives, right?

During that first year it became apparent that iBeacon was a framework – not a shiny device – and that a lot of work was left to the developer. Announced “deployments” fell victim to PR-inflated yet still unfulfilled hype. This same hype trough happens with every new platform. Bitcoin finds itself in a similar phase today. It didn’t help that marketers ran case studies extoling the virtues of coupons for free sausage when you were in the grocery aisle. I’d argue no one wants a coupon for sausage pushed to their phone – particularly when it’s in only one store on one aisle for one month, with no real consumer value and no at-scale app penetration.

During that trough of disillusionment, it was easy to lose track of what it meant to develop modern contextual experiences in mobile. In the picture above, we’ve depicted the developer journey for creating e-commerce enabled contextual mobile apps. This developer journey is the same for big companies and small alike. Since iBeacon is a developer framework, Estimote embraced the initial go-to-market for small developers who would take risks—cute colorful beacons helped embody our brand, but the real goal was building a community of developers to help us iterate on new tools and software and optimize for all phases of go-to-market and deployment.

As we watched the beacon market mature, we stayed grounded in the user experience always asking: what is the consumer value? Meanwhile, the dominant mobile platforms began to reveal new front end experiences, giving us advanced ways of interacting with our physical environment, such as Apple Proactive Assistant and Google Now.

There are reasons that the user experience in mobile is evolving faster than in past platforms. We are amidst a developer renaissance that did not occur in PCs which has created a sort of revolution – indeed the smartphone is the new sun– accelerating innovation at break neck pace, as abundant supply chains create new device categories and new developer frameworks from Apple and Google proliferate magnitudes faster than in platforms past.

It’s now mid-2015 , almost 2 years since iBeacon was launched and the world’s four biggest mobile companies (and four biggest platforms!) – Apple, Google, Facebook and Tencent (WeChat) – have now publicly embraced and built experiences around Bluetooth beacons. Rarely does a new technology get adopted uniformly like this by large incumbents without cross collaboration.

Moreover, the entire beacon stack is now enterprise ready. The world’s most sophisticated companies, like Target, are now launching incredible consumer experiences and massive rollouts.

As the industry really catches fire, we wanted to share what Estimote has learned from working with the most innovative enterprises in relation to helping developers navigate the journey depicted above:

1. Beacons Need to be Software Defined: Software-defined networking (SDN) is an approach to computer networking that allows network administrators to manage network services through abstraction of lower-level functionality. Beacons, at their core, should be software defined and agnostic to the services and lower level protocols they run. What this means in practice is that beacons need to be defined via software, at a point later in time than deployment. This seems blindingly obvious but technically is extremely difficult to implement and usually a deferred concern until right before the decision to go to scale – no enterprise should install beacons unless they can be recalibrated in seconds inside a live store and are field updatable.

2. Resilient and Serviceable Infra Isn’t Commodity: Enterprises need infrastructure that is resilient and lasts forever in a bunch of different dimensions. Power is the base dimension. But are we confident that something won’t be obsolete 12 months or 24 months from now in a different dimension? No. If new protocols or patches need to be pushed to the network, the network should absorb them. This is software defined networking, and it’s why commodity is the wrong term for beacons. Commodity does not imply assembled from commodity components, it implies interchangeable and indistinguishable. When you’re shipping 100,000 beacons to an enterprise customer who spends thousands of man-hours installing them, beacons are anything but interchangeable.

3. A Customer-Centric Approach Leads to an Agile Platform: Replicating bugs and fixing issues is dependent on having customers. This may seem like a rhetorical statement. But keep in mind beacons are a new platform and a lot was missing in iBeacon which is necessary to deploy at scale. How do you get bug reports if you don’t have any deployments or customers? Throughout the 2 year period since iBeacon was launched, Estimote has been focused on going up-channel though the developer market to enterprise. This has given us over 50,000 paying customers around the world and has enabled us to do agile development at the platform level, effectively empowering our customers to help us spec new services… services that are necessary for enterprise deployments and are missing in iBeacon. These include indoor location as-a-service, secure infrastructure, infrastructure sharing, and elegant management of tens or hundreds of thousands of beacons from a remote location.

4. Enterprises Platforms Need to Support Apple and Google: When we talk about iBeacon leading up to its two year anniversary, as advanced enterprise deployments emerge, Android deployments are still largely absent in conversations today. That’s because during the 2 years that PMs and developers have been planning, piloting and building iBeacon deployments, Google had a non-existent voice. Of course that all changed recently. But the launch of Eddystone, and its tighter integration with Android, will take time to catch up – Android simply lags vs iOS in modern app development. But the real question is when it’s ready, will your deployed beacons work with Eddystone, or more importantly whatever new framework might be coming next? The answer is no unless the firmware is updateable over the air in the background, without truck rolls or auxiliary hardware. Every beacon we’ve ever shipped can be updated via our SDK to support the latest firmware—including things coming that have not been announced. You simply can’t throw up a bunch of dumb hardware on the wall and get the same result that enterprises like Target want to achieve.

5. A Modular Approach to Beacons and Omnichannel is key: We’ve been talking for a while about how we prefer a modular approach to beacons. Our engineers have focused on creating a web services model centered around easily consumable toolkits of developer facing SDKs and APIs. We believe it should be really easy to layer a content management solution (CMS) from a preferred vendor and then tie it back to end-customer data through a native CRM. The old way of melding e-commerce, server and POS store data was brittle. We love working with companies who power new experiences for enterprise customers—our array of solution partners increasingly prefer Estimote precisely because we’ve exposed web services via elegant APIs and we iterate and ship quickly as the space evolves. In this way we’re a little like Stripe, who is trusted and loved as an e-commerce platform because they greatly simplify the steps it takes to accept payments. We sometimes think of Estimote as the ‘Stripe for iBeacon’.

As we reflect on the stack we’re building, we’re blown away that in less than 2 years since iBeacon was launched, the world’s most admired brands are announcing massive deployments. It is truly a phenomenal testament to how permissionless innovation in mobile has compressed innovation cycles—we’re now seeing both the developer community and large enterprises adopt completely new mobile technologies faster than any time in history. This trend is buoyed by new fundamentals in the mobile value chain as well as system wide network effects. We are amidst the biggest secular bull phase for contextual and payment technologies we’ve ever seen.

At Estimote, we love embracing hard technical challenges and aspire for the world to be a brighter, smarter more connected place. And since application layer context is broadly speaking a new physical layer, we’re expecting developers to build amazing new contextualized experiences that completely change how we go about our lives. And if we can be part of the conversation as this next exciting phase unfolds, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Steve Cheney, Co-Founder, Estimote

At Estimote, we maintain a philosophy that software is never complete. We optimize for shipping updates often, to every part of our stack (firmware, mobile SDK’s, cloud back-end & API’s). Simultaneously, we optimize our release cycles for developers, typically pushing new features to our 50,000-strong community even if our early code has a few rough edges. But we release with those imperfections precisely because we know that you - our robust, vocal, and demanding community - will help us find bugs, ideate new features, and push the limits of what’s possible. That constant feedback loop between our product and our customers is vital to our success.

Today we’re pushing a new beacon firmware live (version 3.2) to build upon the latest version that included our recently-announced support for Eddystone, an open BLE format released by Google. The new firmware includes a security patch to make your beacon hardware even more secure and can be installed on every beacon you already own.

Beacon security

As with any new technology, security is always a paramount concern for those implementing it. These concerns are only more valid as the velocity and scale of enterprise beacon deployments accelerate. Keeping your Estimote Beacon infrastructure secure has always been - and will always be - one of our top priorities.

Back in 2013, during the first days of iBeacon, we shipped dev kits without any security mechanisms in place, precisely because it was early days. We knew it was more important to get early adopters testing and sending us feedback than optimizing for an “enterprise checklist.” Of course, as the months progressed and our customers began to move from in-office prototypes to full-scale public deployments, we’ve layered on many important enterprise-grade improvements required by any good mobile leader: integration with Estimote Cloud for beacon authentication, Secure UUID to encrypt beacon IDs, and Infrastructure Sharing to safely share your beacon network. These mechanisms combine to prevent any actors with malicious intent from compromising your beacon infrastructure.

Network security, however, is an ongoing effort. Today’s update patches a vulnerability brought to our attention by the good folks at MAKE: Magazine. We rely on our developer community to challenge us and help us improve Estimote’s platform, every single day. It was possible to hack the previous implementation of beacon authorization to obtain the keys necessary to configure beacons to which you had no rightful claim or ownership. With today’s firmware update, that is no longer possible. This new firmware has already been tested by many of our customers in their production environments and now it’s ready to be publicly available for all Estimote developers, even those just experimenting with a few dev kits.

Update your beacons today

We’re not aware of any incidents related to this vulnerability and the risk of exposure remains small; an attacker would need to build an app with the right key, physically approach every single beacon they wished to alter, and then programmatically connect to it. We nonetheless encourage you to update your beacon firmware today. Every beacon we’ve ever shipped is compatible with today’s update and you can already install it via our iOS app (version 2.15.1) and Android app (version 1.0.5), or the Estimote SDK 3.4.0.

If you have any concerns, questions, or feedback about today’s update, our current security mechanisms, or the nuances of deploying beacons at scale, you can reach out to us anytime. We’re committed to building a secure beacon platform and are proud to have a community of developers helping us keep this commitment. We’re waiting for your tweets and emails!

Today we’re excited to announce the next big evolution of the Estimote platform: we’ve integrated Estimote Indoor Location, Estimote Stickers, and Estimote Cloud to unlock even more contextually-powered mobile experiences. With today’s release of our indoor location product, you can now see and search for nearables in specific locations, and soon you’ll be able to build your own apps on top of this infrastructure. We call this a location intelligence platform, and it takes a lot more than beacons to make it a reality.

The physical world truly is a canvas for the next generation of mobile apps. Download the updated Estimote Indoor Location app to experience the new features today.

An OS for the physical world

From the very beginning, our strategy has never been to be just a beacon company. Of course we do design and produce our own hardware, but it’s because we firmly believe the best way to deliver real value – for developers, enterprises, and end users – is with a tightly integrated full stack. As Alan Kay famously put it: “people who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” Our BLE beacon and sticker hardware is the foundational layer for our larger vision and goal: to build an operating system for the physical world. Every feature and product we ship brings us closer to a fantastic new future in which our smart devices are no longer blind to the world around us.

Estimote Indoor Location is a central component of building that future. Understanding a person’s position (micro-location) within a space, in an accurate and reliable way that is easy for developers to spin up, without excess overhead in calibration and setup, is a tremendous engineering challenge. But we’ve been up to it, investing heavily in location intelligence since shortly after we started shipping beacons. Tracking back to version 1 of our Indoor Location SDK in Fall 2014 we’ve continually released new improvements focusing on ongoing stability, accuracy, and scalability enhancements, as well as integration with Estimote Cloud to monitor locations via the web and see people in real time. Now, we’re adding nearables into the mix to bring together location context, the power of the cloud, and physical objects.

A location intelligence platform for people and objects

When we think of the future of location and context, we imagine the journey we go about in our daily lives, in busy office environments, in large retailers and even at home. What if the important objects in our home or office were always discoverable to us, or you could search on an app for the location of Black Friday specials when you arrive at the store?

Take the examples shown in the office environment in the video embedded in this post. We’re all familiar with the occasional frustrations of working in a busy office environment, where keeping track of your colleagues and your stuff can be a pain. Rather than walking all over to find your coworker for your upcoming meeting, imagine pulling out your smartphone to see her location in real-time. Turns out she’s lingering in the break room, but that’s okay because you can use that extra time to search for the projector since you see someone’s taken it from the conference room. Simply type HDMI Projector into your office app’s search box and voila, item located! All of this is possible today with the latest Estimote Indoor Location app.

If you’re in a public location (or one that belongs or has been shared with you), opening the app will automatically launch it into the location view, showing your position on the map along with the position of any other users and public nearables. Your own nearables will also be demarcated. And if there are any other locations in range, you can switch to viewing those in just two taps.

The most powerful feature of the new app is the ability to search for objects tagged with Estimote Stickers. Simply enter the name of a nearable and you’ll know exactly where it’s located. It’ll be highlighted on a map of the relevant location, as long as the location itself is either public or belongs to you.

How do we know a nearable’s position, you ask? This is where the magic of Estimote Cloud kicks in: any time a user of the Indoor Location app enters range of a sticker with the app in the foreground (background mode coming), that nearable’s position is saved in the cloud. It works even if the nearable is private. In this case it won’t be visible for anyone except the owner, but everyone will be still be passively updating its location.

We’ve made some other improvements to Estimote Cloud as well. You can log into your Estimote Account and access your mapped locations anytime. You’ll see if there are any people or nearables there. And now you can also edit the location. Just click Edit Floor Plan and use your mouse to drag and drop the corners. If you’re not satisfied with the map drawn by the Indoor Location app or SDK, you no longer have to map the room anew or adjust it programmatically with the SDK. Instead, now you can tailor the dimensions of the location to within centimeters for greater precision and stability.

What’s coming next?

Currently searching for nearables is available only in the Indoor Location app but we’re already working to bring it to the SDK as well. Just imagine how much power this unlocks for developers: a crowdsourced infrastructure of locations and objects, with all the data securely stored in the cloud. The applications are endless, from retail to museums to asset tracking in industrial and personal environments. And as for the nearables and stickers themselves…stay tuned for some exciting announcements very soon.

Want to start playing with beacons, nearables, and Estimote Indoor Location now? Perfect! Just download our app from iTunes and don’t forget to let us know how you like it. You can do that over email or by tweeting @Estimote. And if you don’t have your dev kit yet, grab one at Estimote.com.

Wojtek Borowicz, Community Evangelist at Estimote

Tanuj Parikh, Head of Business at Estimote

This is a guest post by Kim Adams, Marketing Coordinator at GuestDriven.

Hotel stays are inherently physical experiences. As such, hoteliers have a need to manage communication, engagement and service at properties of all sizes as guests move about the space. These efforts can be more efficient for hotels and more rewarding for guests with the use of beacon technology.

In terms of the guest lifecycle, beacons are used during the in-stay period of the fuller journey, just as other strategic tools are used by hotels in the pre- and post-stay periods.

Timeliness and automation are two very key benefits of configuring beacons to trigger smart campaigns, an example being when a guest enters the lobby and is sent a welcome message or offer. As you can imagine, the conversion rates on this type of engagement - contextually relevant - are difficult to beat using any manual or human effort engagement strategies.

Hotels seek to deliver the right message, to the right person, through the right channel, at the right time - and in merchandising cases - for the right price. Beacons enable hotels to get it right on all counts, with a variety of interaction scenarios possible. These include campaigns to increase engagement, personalization and revenue for example, using carefully designed calls-to-action.

In a 180-room urban boutique hotel in North America, the following results were seen across a 90-day pilot period:

So what do these numbers mean? If hotels understand the amount of time spent on-property versus off-property during a stay, they can understand their key windows of time and best physical touchpoints for engagement. In some cases we have found that up to 90% of guest time is spent away from the property. Hotels find themselves left with little time to engage with guests, so making this engagement automated and personal is key to achieving maximum results.

The power of prompting and suggesting certain behaviour at key moments is invaluable for hotels. The thing is that so much goes on behind the scenes, so much manpower and care, to make an incredible guest experience. We’re not at the point yet where technology fully replaces that. However, if certain high-conversion and high-ROI functions can be automated and taken care of by technology, the human touch can remain to be just that. Being high-tech and high-touch at the same time is possible. And profitable!

About GuestDriven

GuestDriven is a mobile guest engagement platform, that enables hotels to engage with their guests to deliver an authentic and memorable travel experience.

Express is a pre-stay solution enabling guests to begin their check-in process online while allowing hotels to drive new revenue through upgrades and offers.

Engage is an in- and post-stay solution bringing real-time engagement and smart merchandising to hotels’ fingertips. Estimote Beacons work with the Engage solution.

A full-suite dashboard provides meaningful analytics, rich guest profiles as well as campaign and request management functionality, enabling hotels to elevate the guest experience while driving their bottom line.

Kim Adams, Marketing Coordinator at GuestDriven

It’s been a while since we last talked about the Estimote SDK, so sit down, relax, and let us take you on a tour of what we’ve been up to these past few releases. Configurable stickers settings and iOS 9 compatibility aside, we’ve got better error reporting, improved performance, and lots of updates to the Android SDK.

Configurable stickers settings

Today, we’re releasing an updated Estimote iOS SDK (3.7.0), and a new Estimote Stickers firmware (SA1.1.0) to go with it—a tandem which unlocks the configuration options of our sticker beacons. You can now change their transmit power (to adjust their range) and advertising interval (to tweak their responsiveness).

The quickest way to go about that is to build yourself the Examples project bundled with the SDK, and use its Nearable Demos: Device Settings and Update Firmware. Estimote iOS app will soon be updated to utilize this latest SDK and let you manage your stickers’ settings in a more convenient way. Android SDK and app will join the club later this year.

Last but not least, keep in mind that increasing the broadcasting power and lowering the advertising interval will shorten the battery life of your stickers—which is one year on the default settings.

iOS 9 compatibility

If, just like us, you’ve been eagerly waiting to utilize all of the latest and greatest developer features tied to iOS 9 release, here’s some good news: Estimote SDK 3.7.0 was compiled with Xcode 7 and brings two of such additions with it!

First: bitcode support. Bitcode is a new technology from Apple that allows apps to be compiled, linked, and optimized on the App Store.

What does it mean? Say, if Apple comes up with a new optimization technique in their compiler in the future, they’ll be able to re-optimize your app without you having to submit a new binary to the App Store.

Taking advantage of bitcode requires all the frameworks in the app bundle to include bitcode. Guess what, Estimote SDK 3.7.0 does!

Second: we added nullability and generics annotations to our header files, which means Estimote SDK is now much easier to use with Swift 2.0: all the optional and non-optional values are clearly marked so, and containers now specify the type of the objects they hold. Compare:

func beaconManager(manager: AnyObject!,
                   didRangeBeacons beacons: [AnyObject]!,
                   inRegion region: CLBeaconRegion!) {
    // ...
}

… to:

func beaconManager(manager: ESTBeaconManagerType,
                   didRangeBeacons beacons: [CLBeacon],
                   inRegion region: CLBeaconRegion) {
    // ...
}

No more let beaconsReally = beacons as! [CLBeacon].

Better error reporting

In SDK 3.7.0, we’re also taking a first step towards better error reporting, with the goal of accelerating troubleshooting … nothing more frustrating than being stuck with a cryptic error message—or worse even, the app not behaving as expected despite there being no errors at all.

We’ve started with the ESTBeaconManager. If you’ve ever wondered why your ranging delegate is not being called, only to find out that you forgot or misspelled the NSLocationWhenInUseUsageDescription (tell us this is not a typo-magnet!) key in the Info.plist file, our SDK will now let you know that you’re trying to use ranging and/or monitoring without appropriate Location Services authorization.

Similarly, if you’ve ever experienced the cryptic “The operation couldn’t be completed. (kCLErrorDomain error 5.)” error message, our SDK will now let you know this means you’re trying to monitor for more than 20 regions at a time.

Last but not least, if you forget to implement the monitoringDidFailForRegion or rangingBeaconsDidFailForRegion delegates, and an error happens, our SDK will print the error in Xcode’s console instead … and gently remind you to implement them, so that you properly handle the errors and not leave the users of your app confused as to why it’s not working.

Better performance for large-scale deployments

With more and more at-scale beacon deployments rolling out, we’ve also comitted to making our SDK more robust, and perform better under heavy load. We’ve made numerousimprovements to Secure UUID, decreased SDK initialization time, and dramatically improved performance of collecting analytics.

Estimote Android stack, almost caught up!

Last but not least, we’ve been iterating a lot on our Androidstack in the past few months. We added support for Estimote Cloud in April; firmware update in May; nearables/stickers, Power Modes, and Flip to Sleep in June; Eddystone in July; our enterprise-security firmware in August; support for built-in temperature and acceleration sensors in September; and finally, just a few days ago, we brought Secure UUID compatiblity into our Android stack. We anticipate to have all the other features ported to Android by the end of the year.

It’s a wrap

Would now be a good time to recommend always keeping the Estimote SDK up-to-date, to benefit from the latest and greatest? Let us also remind you that we’re on CocoaPods, which makes updating the SDK as simple as pod update.

Piotr Krawiec, Technology Evangelist, Estimote
& the Estimote SDK team

You probably already know that Estimote is a developer-oriented company. But we’re not just building things for developers. We’re building things with developers. We’ve been fostering a community around our products for a little over two years now, and through those efforts have exposed over 50,000 people to our technology. These people are now a hive mind fueling product development. We wanted to share why and how we do it.

Why is the question

Why community? We’re working hard to push the boundaries of mobile with our Location Intelligence Platform but the history of technology shows that all innovations can be copied – and often are. Much more difficult to replicate are the relationships you have with your users. If people care about your product enough that they want to collaborate and contribute to its development, you’re in a pole position for two reasons. First, these users are so invested in you that the competitors will have a hard time poaching them. Second, you have the brainpower of a dispersed yet enormous hive mind behind the product.

And if you look at successful developer-oriented companies, the trend is clear. GitHub, Docker, Xamarin, Braintree, SendGrid, Twilio, Heroku, Stack Overflow, MongoDB. They all have a common denominator: community.

So that’s the why. As for the how, allow us to rewind to Estimote’s early days…

High time

It was late 2013. We were fresh out of Y Combinator, had just won TechCruch Disrupt Best Hardware Startup, and were on our way to raising a seed round from great investors. Good, right? Not so fast. All the awards in the world aren’t worth anything if you’re not satisfying your customers - and we weren’t. We had an inbox swollen with hundreds of unanswered inquiries from eager developers and customers. Sure, that’s a “good problem to have” – but a problem nonetheless. People were frustrated and we were risking losing them before they even really arrived. So we took action. The Estimote Community Team was created to repair and improve our relationship with developers and then expand into community building.

Customer service was the immediate priority. We decided that response time would be the primary KPI. First, because developers should be able to move fast and break things, which requires access to rapid troubleshooting. It would be a waste to lose an early adopter because they were stuck on an issue and their enthusiasm waned before we reacted. Second, because differentiating here is low-hanging fruit. The global state of customer service is dreadful. For most people a fast resolution to their problem is a delight, because it’s the opposite of what they’re used to. See for yourself:

We started fixing. To put the challenge in perspective: in January 2014, our support ticket backlog was several weeks long and our median response time was almost eleven hours. Unacceptable. Fast forward to June 2015 and median response time had been cut to 24 minutes, with only a few customers ever waiting for more than 24 hours for a response. That’s with six people and no use of autoresponders.

How did we get there? The answer is deceptively simple: process. We know, we know. Few words evoke as much eye-rolling and disdain in early-stage startups. We hate a bad process as much as anyone. A bad process is a set of abstract rules into which managers stubbornly try to cram reality. But a good process is a life saver. Good process is one you build around reality, considering both goals and resources. And it needs to be flexible. Change is constant and the process should evolve accordingly.

Process: Zendesk shifts, power hours, and an evangelist

We set a goal: median first reply time should be less than one hour. Then we looked at the distribution of support tickets over time to design the team’s schedule. But it wasn’t a simple calculation of if most tickets arrive at Time X then make sure everyone is present at Time X. The devil lies in the details. Our Community Team is in the Central European time zone, yet Estimote has clients all over the world. Plus there should always be overlap between shifts: if someone needs help solving an issue, we didn’t want to leave them hanging. And no one wants to work late shifts on Friday. And people go on vacations. And sick days catch you off-guard all year long. And we had to make time for the team’s other responsibilities (e.g., managing social media, hosting events, creating content, assisting our dev teams with QA, and more). If we weren’t flexible, the process would break down.

We spent weeks testing different schedules and processes, all the while measuring their effectiveness against our response time. We landed on a system in which every Community Team member rotates shifts. These spanned past normal working hours and also weekends, to ensure full coverage for our global customer base. We also set up Zendesk shifts. While on a Zendesk shift, you were responsible for replying to a new inquiry immediately. But with over a hundred tickets coming in daily, even that wasn’t good enough. So we instituted power hours twice a day, during those periods our data told us were the highest traffic times. During a power hour it’s all hands on deck for support.

That worked really well for 90% of inquiries, the easy ones. The rest were trickier. They were often from developers further along in their development cycle with Estimote and often required us to consult with our engineering and product colleagues. These were the most rewarding tickets to solve. By helping a sophisticated customer overcome a complex issue, we seized an opportunity to provide a great customer experience and a moment of delight. But on the other hand, it’s also a temptation to disrupt the work of product teams with support tasks.

To balance that tension, we hired our first Technology Evangelist in mid-2014. You may have met him on Twitter or at one of a dozen of hackathons around the world. He not only responds to most intricate technical inquiries, but he’s also responsible for teaching the complexities of our APIs and SDKs to the non-technical crewmembers. This latter piece was key. Obviously one person could never scale fast enough with the growth of our community, so sharing knowledge internally to make the rest of the team proficient at answering technical inquiries has had a huge impact on our reply time and customer satisfaction.

Eighteen months of constant iteration on our process has paid dividends. That’s the evolution of our median reply time:

By the people, for the people

Having established a great process for customer service and achieving our main goal of driving down response time to less than an hour, our team was given an additional charter: go from servicing the community to building it. We’d already seen how quality support and a proactive attitude could yield outsized positive benefits, for instance via partnerships with companies like Xamarin and Evothings that bring iBeacon to thousands of non-native developers. Going further, we knew that as our community was growing, it was time to shift focus from talking with the community to making the community talk amongst themselves. It was time to harness the power of a hive mind.

So we created a new goal: rather than simply focusing on reducing response time, we wanted to reduce the number of inquiries by making support self-service. So we spent weeks drafting and updating content for our Knowledge Base. We renamed articles to improve search, merged overlapping entries, and deleted redundant posts. The changes made articles most important for beginners easier to find. Even more important was the creation of the Estimote Developer Portal. Officially launched in June, it has become the go-to place for resources about building apps with beacons. And this is how it grows as we populate it with more tutorials and documentation.

The Knowledge Base and Developer Portal succeeded in helping us educate the community, but neither impacted the number of incoming inquiries. What really moved the needle was the launch of Estimote Forums. Prior to March 2015, we only used a QA component in the Knowledge Base but it just didn’t work. The same questions would pop up repeatedly. Replacing the QA with forums (by the way, join here) made it much easier for people to find information and share their knowledge. Discussion between developers facing similar issues or brainstorming new ideas quickly took off, creating more value than we could have imagined. There’s also another benefit for us. Our Zendesk inbox is exclusively the Community Team’s jurisdiction. The forums, on the other hand, are actively monitored by Estimote’s engineers and product teams too. They now stay in touch with the community directly and understand their pains and gains using Estimote hardware and software. The hive mind works.

Just look at the graph showing evolution of the number of tickets and forums activity over the same period. Tickets go down 40% as the traffic on forums rises steadily.

Understanding the pains and gains is another thing we now focus on much more. Throughout 2015, we’ve been fostering relationships with our developer community by proactively reaching out to them, instead of waiting for them to contact us. We’re supporting meetups and hackathons all over the world. Tens of them this year. That’s more events than we can attend, so we often supply resources while the community takes care of organizing and evangelizing. It’s a testament to the relationships we’ve built over the last two years.

But we don’t just talk to developers at events. We talk to them all the time. With the abundance of data-gathering tools like Google Analytics, Heap, and Mixpanel, you can track everything. So we do. We track usage of features and then reach out to people. Why do you use it? Why not? How can we improve? If not for talking to people who had spent inordinate time shielding beacons with ovens and fridges, we never would have thought of features like Flip to Sleep. It’s as important to follow up when they release an app. We want developers to be able to share their success, so we feature their work on the Get Inspired page. We want them to get recognition whether they’ve built a simple hack or a whole new platform backed with VC money.

Lessons learned

Don’t think everything along the way has been rainbows and butterflies. Trial and error only works if you actually get some errors. We’ve learned a few difficult lessons that we’ve shared below. Though these may help your team, they also very well may not. The beauty (and the curse) of Community Management is that every group is different. One thing will work, the other will totally fail. All you can do is test.

1. It’s always about people, not tickets

“Wow, we’ve crushed 500 emails this week!,” a Community Manager might say on Friday afternoon. Impressive! But what happens if we swap the word “emails” with “people”? A massacre. When dealing with really big communities, it’s easy to forget that there’s a person behind every message. And when you don’t remember there’s a human asking a question, it’s impossible to empathize with them and deliver the highest quality service. It’s also easy to think the 10th person asking the same trivial question is an idiot. Fight this thought as soon as possible. Otherwise your brain will soon do a mental shortcut: inquiries = idiots. Rather than looking for flaws in people that write to you, search for the flaws in your product that caused the inquiry in the first place.

2. Don’t push it

It’s en vogue at startups today to be obsessed with speed. Fail fast. Deploy daily. Iterate immediately. This often translates well for product and engineering teams but can backfire when building a community. Despite the temptation, don’t try to shortcut the process of building an authentic and engaged community that not only wants to talk to you, but to each other. Community quality develops when users really understand your product. Community engagement develops when they acknowledge there’s a value in talking with other members. We all know dozens of strategies that help foster both - emails, direct conversations, gamification. But don’t push it and don’t do this:

Building communities is a marathon, not a sprint.

3. Aim for simplicity with all your internal tools

The example above isn’t something we’re doing at Estimote, but at one point we came close. With the proliferation of business tools in use today, each with their own API’s for integration (or services like Zapier), it’s tempting to want to design a flow in which your Zendesk talks to your Slack and creates a record in Salesforce and a card in Trello and sends an email to a Google Apps alias. Don’t do it. Almost always, those flows work better on a whiteboard than in practice. Start with simple solutions and only look to standardize them with technology when you know they work and are ready to scale. For instance, the easiest way to pass feedback to product managers is with Post-It Notes. Only turn to Trello and subsequently an API integration with a Zendesk widget after you’ve validated that flow over time. Keep it simple!

4. First, remove all pain points

When it comes to product development, it’s more fun to dream up new features than focus on fixing bugs or optimizing existing flows. It’s normal: features are sexy. But community managers need to remember that every obstacle a user encounters in your app, website, etc. is a wall that shields them from enjoying your product. And, by extension, from joining the community. At the end of the day, your job is to make your users awesome (tip of the hat to the Kathy Sierra’s great book). So empathize with your community and when discussing priorities internally, be sure to advocate for solving the pain points that exist today, before building the features of tomorrow.

5. Burnout is a normal thing, don’t fight it

We all know that feeling. The frustration when you’re looking at your next email. The weariness when you need to jump to another conversation, and you just don’t want to do it. As a community manager you will be exposed to complaints, problems, bug reports, and arguments. Even when you get tons of positive feedback, it’s the negative comments that stick with us and make our work hard. You can try to fight/hide/run from burnout. It will benefit you in the short term, but it will hurt your team and company in the long run. There is no easy solution. But one good thing you can do about that is a conversation. Talk with your manager, talk with your colleagues. If you don’t want to answer emails for two or three days, it’s fine. Everyone needs a break sometimes. If you tell your colleagues you need a rest and want to jump to a different project, you will avoid being accused of slacking or not helping your team. Be honest, it’s as simple as that.

Rethinking (with) the hive mind

With community building, you’re always only 5 percent done. And the remaining 95 percent changes all the time. The role of a Community Manager evolves with the community. Recently we’ve completely restructured the Community Team and moved several people to a new Customer Success Team, devoted to building lasting business partnerships. The Community Team is shifting its focus again to new goals and challenges. Good thing we have the power of a 50,000+ strong hive mind to back us up.

By the way, if you want to join Estimote Community Team and help us go from 50,000 to 500,000 and beyond, we’re hiring. Dare to join the mission!

Witek Socha, Community Manager at Estimote

Wojtek Borowicz, Community Evangelist at Estimote

FC Barcelona is an icon: a symbol for locals in Catalonia and the best football team in the world for millions of fans across the globe. But Barça doesn’t only lead on the pitch. As part of the Smart Espai Barça initiative, the club is collaborating with SinergiaLabs to better engage the always-connected fans. Now when supporters visit Camp Nou, FC Barcelona’s home arena greets them with contextual experience based on Estimote Beacons.

We sat down with the team behind implementing beacons at Camp Nou, lead by Jordi Sabater, Dani Plana and Odón Martí, to talk about the project, its future, and challenges they faced.

Can you tell us more about your collaboration with FC Barcelona?

FC Barcelona is building a Stadium 2.0 project and we are collaborating with them to bring the best experience to fans. SinergiaLabs is a consortium of three companies and we have used Estimote Beacons to refresh the home turf of one of world’s most beloved teams with a new digital facade.

What’s the experience you have designed for the FC Barcelona app?

The principal app for FC Barcelona contains information about what is happening with each of the professionals teams of FCB including football, basketball, hockey, handball, and more. Beacons have been installed at the stadium’s entrance. Currently, the app welcomes thousands of visitors and fans every day. It also triggers specials promotions depending on the user’s location. The app even allows you to buy tickets for Camp Nou museum tour.

How did you like working with Estimote Beacons, Cloud, and SDK?

Working with the SDKs was very easy. First, we downloaded the Estimote app to better understand the possibilities and get accustomed to how beacons behave. Once the testing stage was completed, it was easy to make sure everything worked correctly. We followed by leveraging the API to understand the battery performance and to gather analytics.

We’ve built our own content management system to manage notifications and content. It allows to decide in which moment of the day and in which zones of the stadium the notifications should be sent. Additionally, it includes a heatmap with real-time information about all interactions of fans with the beacons.

How did deploying the beacons go?

After running the internal tests we headed to the stadium to proceed with the installation. We started with maximum range for all beacons, but the signal bleed between zones made us rethink the strategy. A bit of calibration was required here and there. We also learned how beacons perform outdoors. We first installed them in winter, when temperatures were around 0º Celsius. Months later Barcelona was hit by record heat waves and temperatures went up to 52º Celsius. Luckily, in both scenarios beacons worked perfectly.

We also worked a lot on positioning the beacons. In one case, we placed a beacon on a concrete column in the basketball court. It reflected the signal so strongly that it reached 150 meters in the opposite direction. We needed to adjust the signal strength to make it work properly.

Can you tell us more about the team behind the project?

SinergiaLabs is a joint-venture of three companies, IMAT Comunicación, Morning Labs and Comunicacion Activa that is focusing on the best mobile solutions using beacon technology.

Our background is wide, covering marketing and communication, technology and mobile consulting, so we can offer an integral service to our customers.

Jonathan Duque, Director of Customer Success at Estimote

This is a guest post by Sun Sachs, SVP Product, Design & Engineering at Townsquare Media

We recently completed our first Summer music festival season setting up Estimote Beacons at our largest music festivals over the past three months. This post is intended to be a practical summary of what we learned towards the goal of helping others achieve similar challenges.

Our high-level goals were to help transform the music festival experience by leveraging beacons to deliver useful an engaging features and exclusive content for all attendees. We targeted our largest music festivals for this strategy including Mountain Jam (Hunter Mountain, NY), Taste of Country Festival (Hunter Mountain, NY), Country Jam (Grand Junction, CO) and WE Fest (Detroit Lakes, MN) with a combined total of over 300,000+ attendees and 300+ beacons.

One of our primary use cases was to create iBeacon regions mapped to important landmarks within each festival to deliver context aware notifications and content to all attendees using our festival app. To solve these requirements we needed an efficient way to configure each beacon’s power and advertising intervals along with context specific meta data including GPS location, region name, placement photo and description. Using the Estimote SDK we created a custom beacon configuration app that provided three high-level features.

1. iBeacon Configuration

This interface allowed us to configure beacons on the fly by using a ranging algorithm to determine the beacon closest to the device. Tip: When configuring beacons leave the bag of beacons at least 25 yards from the beacon you are trying to configure. You can also use Flip to Sleep mode to mute some beacons. And if you’re feeling really ambitious you can also construct a faraday cage or bag to house your beacons which will effectively block all BLE signal.

Once the app is connected to the beacon, it displays the full set of available meta data to be configured for each beacon. Here we entered a description of the location, selected the specific region e.g. main stage, tuned the power/advertising settings depending upon the placement, captured the GPS location and took a placement photo for retrieving the beacon at the end of the festival. All-in-all this configuration process only took approximately 2-3 minutes per beacon with most of the time spent doing the physical installation (see installation best practices below).

2. iBeacon Locations

After we completed the installation and configuration for each region we then performed a round of Q.A. testing using our beacon locator feature. This feature provided a mashup of our geofence data from a KML file and the GPS locations for all of our beacons to provide a live view of each beacon’s location within each region. Tip: Depending upon how you are using your beacon GPS data you may want to offset the GPS coordinates from the actual beacon placement. For example, if the beacon GPS data is being used in a live display showing a user’s real-time location you don’t necessarily want to show them placed in the exact location of the beacon e.g. mounted to the side of a tent so offsetting the GPS towards the center of the landmark is a quick fix for this issue.

For QA testing we canvassed the different regions selecting the beacon we were closest to and confirming the proper power settings and placement locations. This detailed view above provided a real-time view of the distance from the beacon, the placement photo and an audible beeping tone that increased in pitch as the device got closer to the target beacon. This feature proved exceptionally helpful for comparing the power/distance level to quickly determine possible interference or placement issues. Tip: When a beacon has a significantly lower power reading than the actual setting e.g. a setting of 50 ft.(-12 dBm) but is only broadcasting at 5ft then there is usually a problem with some physical obstruction that is weakening the signal. In this case you can reposition the beacon, clear the obstruction or increase the power.

3. iBeacon Alerts

For the last portion of our Q.A. we performed a hands-on test walking through the most common pathways for each region confirming that we received a context-based location alert. To do this we created a simple interface for selecting a region, creating a test alert and publishing it to our backend system for our festival app to retrieve on a regular interval. This feature proved especially helpful in not only making sure the high-level functionality was working properly but also to help make some final business decisions around specific context-based alerts. For example it may be more critical for a ticket booth to broadcast 270 feet into the surrounding grounds than other landmarks like food and drink vendors which benefit from a closer proximity based notification. Tip: When testing different regions it may be necessary to first leave the test region and re-enter it again in order to register the iBeacon region change. In extreme cases we also toggled the ranging feature on and off before re-entering the test region to make sure the app region session was fully expired before performing a fresh test.

Beacon Installation Best Practices Installing beacons in multiple locations over the Summer also had the added benefit of refining our process and developing this set best practices below.

1. Install Beacons in the Most Common Direct Path of your Consumers First survey the target area and think about the common pathways of your users. For example, if the goal is to ensure that every user entering a specific area receives a beacon alert then you may be able to achieve this goal easily by simply targeting the entry way(s) vs. attempting to fully saturate the beacons throughout the entire area. For example we’ve covered areas as large as 10,000 sq ft with a single beacon by strategically placing the beacon in close proximity to the only entrance or exit within the target region.

2. Use Obstacles to your Advantage Another efficient technique for installing beacons is to use obstacles that naturally deflect the beacon signal in certain directions. For example placing a beacon on a metal pole will dampen the beacon output behind the pole and direct the signal in a forward direction. Using this technique, obstacles can act like shields to define boundaries and even limit the amount of overlap between different beacon regions.

3. Always Place Beacons 7-9 Feet High This comes straight out of the Estimote installation guide and is critically important. Anything below 7 feet will severely dampen the BT signal in crowded areas due to the water mass of people which greatly diffuses the beacon signals. Tip: Always make sure that you retest beacon placements during the live event as beacon performance tends to vary in real-world conditions especially with large crowds of hundreds or thousands of people.

Installation Gear

If you’re going to be installing a lot of beacons in quick succession I highly recommend putting together a simple gear bag for each of your installers (see photos below).

• Duct Tape (synthetic with no metal fibers e.g. normal duct tape). My favorite is the camouflage pattern found at Home Depot
• Zip Ties (see example photo below for the most secure method)
• 3M Double Sided Tape (great for ceilings and other flat surfaces where duct tape and zip ties will not work)
• Box Cutter (For tweaking or removing original placement)
• ½ Inch Rope & Carabiners (useful for holding of of this gear hands-free)
• GPS hand-held device (useful for capturing GPS when cell reception or connectivity is weak)

Tip: Always use the adhesive sticky-side back on the beacon for safety (in addition to these other options above)

Additional Tips

Perform multiple rounds of Q.A. If you are installing beacons in a location where many of the physical structures are temporary or other elements of the environment are changing on a daily basis then it is highly advisable to perform multiple rounds of Q.A. The best practice that worked for us was to do three rounds of Q.A. which included:

1. Technical Fine Tuning Q.A. After the initial setup is completed make a full pass tuning the beacon placement and broadcast power settings to further optimize the performance of each beacon. Tip: The Estimote app is also great for this using the list view in the “Devices” section.

2. Pre-Flight Q.A. Walk through all the areas as a consumer would, casually walking from area to area and confirming if there are any reliability or setup issues. This is where you may discover new areas of improvement or places where additional beacons may need to be added to bolster a particular region.

3. Live Q.A. Once your installation is live and the environment is as real-world as possible in terms of the volume of traffic, attendees, etc. walk through the area similar to your pre-flight Q.A. and confirm if there are any issues. Typically this is the part of the testing where we would most likely see issues with the power/distance settings in some areas since crowds can dampen the performance of the BLE signal. Admittedly it’s a bit challenging to remain inconspicuous while walking around holding up an app and looking at the sky. Tip: if anyone asks what you are doing just say that you are testing the Wi-Fi. Nine times out of 10 this will satisfy them.

Study the Live Experience

Perhaps my most favorite thing to do once all of the beacons are setup is to camp out in an area just downstream from a key beacon placement and study how people respond to the context-based alerts and content delivered from the app. For example if your intention is the ensure that an attendee sees a particular offer at just the right time you can observe and make adjustments to how soon they need to receive the alert in order to allow for enough time to look at their device, read the alert and still be near the target area.

The Data

Across our live events we realized a significant increase in the number of meaningful touch points for our attendees delivering more than 50,000 individual alerts at the right time and in the the right context. The alerts varied from public service announcements like storm warnings to discounts and special offers to exclusive content delivered immediately after a performance. We also garnered a much higher level of engagement per user with our mobile event app with an average of 6+ screens visited per session. Top screens included our festival alerts and real-time map features powered by our beacon data.

Future Use Cases

This first year of beacon usage was a fantastic learning opportunity for our company and a way to deliver enhanced services to our consumers and attendees. Next year we are planning on expanding these capabilities in fun and creative ways for our consumers taking advantage of some of the new indoor proximity based solutions as well as the real time beacon data to entertain, provide context and hopefully deliver more meaningful moments of serendipity powered by this innovative technology.

Sun Sachs, SVP Product, Design & Engineering at Townsquare Media

Bringing a new product to life often starts with a meeting between designers, product managers, engineers, and businesspeople. Meetings can accomplish a lot, but they can also distract from the actual work of building something new. At Estimote, we have our fair share of meetings but we prefer to build things rather than talk about them and we believe a single prototype is worth more than a thousand whiteboard sessions. Many developers feel the same way, so we want to give you tools that enable rapid prototyping of beacon-enabled apps and dramatically shorten the learning curve for the Estimote SDK. So we’re excited to introduce our new App Templates in Estimote Cloud.

Source: Dilbert

Time is money

Prototyping is the way to get a project going. It gives you a glimpse into how a product will work and feel, what it can accomplish, and where are its limits. Prototypes also give you something to iterate and improve upon. Crucially, a working prototype is the best way to get meaningful feedback. Testing sessions and focus groups in which participants can interact with a semi-working product are always better than reacting to wireframes and design mockups.

But prototyping is hard. Before your developers build anything, they need to find and test proper tools. They need to read the documentation for APIs and SDKs. Then when they finally get to work, development takes twice as long as estimated. That’s not an indictment of your team, it’s just the reality of how complex it is to build good software. Just take a look at this Quora discussion on why software development estimations are often way off.

Prototyping with iBeacon is no different. In fact, it can be even harder given beacons are a relatively new technology. The learning curve can be intimidating. By adding the physical world as another layer of UX, developing beacon-enabled apps introduces complexities you didn’t need to consider previously.

So development of your project takes longer than expected. Deadlines pass, frustration grows. But it doesn’t have to be like that. That’s why we’re releasing App Templates in Estimote Cloud: a tool for rapid prototyping with iBeacon. Build and release a functional demo in minutes, not days or weeks.

Introducing App Templates

Check out the Apps section of Estimote Cloud to see the new App Templates feature, where you can download a working code sample in just a few clicks. The templates have the Estimote SDK integrated, as well as your beacons’ UUIDs and API tokens for accessing Estimote Cloud API. You can open them in Xcode or Android Studio and keep working on top of the predefined project.

Need an Objective-C demo that triggers the lock screen icon based on beacons? No problem, you’re just a few clicks away. Maybe you want to use Swift to have your app to scan for multiple beacons in range and adjust content based on the closest one? Easy as pie. Or would you rather see how background Monitoring looks in Java? Just download a template and voila!

Templates aren’t just about shortening your development cycle. We’re also deeply passionate about onboarding and educating new Estimote users, so we’ve taken special care to make all templates easy to read, understand, and tweak to your liking. Newcomers will find it easier than ever to become iBeacon pros.

Templates currently available in App Generator:

• Lock Screen Icon: show the app’s icon on the lock screen when in range of a beacon (iOS only).

• Notification: show a notification when entering and exiting beacon’s range.

• Proximity Content for a Single Beacon: show different content when in and out of range of a beacon.

• Proximity Content for Multiple Beacons: show different content next to different beacons. Blank: blank project with Estimote SDK readily integrated.

Now you can have a functional piece of software to work on before you write a single line of code yourself. And we’re just getting started. In the near future you can expect templates for nearables, Indoor Location SDK, Eddystone, and more.

Give it a try, become a contributor

The first version of App Templates has been available for a couple of weeks and we’ve spent a lot of time talking to early adopters to better understand their needs. We now see around 100 apps generated every week, but that’s just the start. We want our community of over 50,000 developers to participate in building this product, which is why App Templates is open to external contributors.

We’ve been blown away by the activity of our community members throughout the last two years. Tutorials, plugins, bindings: you’ve been constantly delivering outstanding software (just see the list of third party resources in our Knowledge Base). We want to make it easier for you to help other developers in the community. So if you’d like to share an app template via App Templates, follow the instructions right here.

Ready to play with the App Templates? Well, it’s definitely better than the meeting you have scheduled for later today. Just log into Estimote Cloud and go to the Apps section. And as always, if you have any questions or ideas to share, we can’t wait to hear them! Drop us a line, post on forums, or tweet @Estimote and we’ll get back to you within a day.

Wojtek Borowicz, Community Evangelist at Estimote

This is a guest post by John Coombs, Co-founder and CEO at Rover

Rover is pleased to announce the launch of the Rover iOS App - another step in bringing your Estimote hardware to life. With the Rover App, you can easily turn your beacons into demos and prototypes in minutes without any coding required. Simply create your free Rover trial account, download the app, and start testing!

Over the past year, one request we have heard consistently was for a demo app that could be used to explore potential content ideas and strategies for beacons and evaluate the Rover Platform - here it is! In addition to beacon-triggered content, you can also use the app to test out Rover’s recently launched Geofencing features.

The Rover App is perfect if you are looking to:

• Quickly and cost effectively explore what your Estimote Beacons can do for your app
• Evaluate how Rover can help you bring your proximity marketing to life
• Turn your beacon hardware in to mobile content for demos and testing with no development required
• Iterate on potential proximity use cases with your team before investing more resources
• Pitch a client with a live demo of what proximity-marketing could look like for them

Simply create your free Rover Trial account, create your content and start seeing your Estimote Beacons come to life!

More on how to get started can be found here with our Set up guide.

Rover is focused on helping marketers, brands, and app owners realize the power of proximity marketing and with the Rover App, this process got that much easier. In just minutes, you will be able to bring your beacons to life and explore use cases and content strategies that work for your brand before doing any coding. Whether you are looking to deliver content in retail, large sports stadiums or at local shops and businesses around town, the Rover platform makes it easy to turn your Estimote Beacons into engaging content for your users as they navigate the physical world.

Link your Rover account to the app and start prototyping!

John Coombs, Co-founder and CEO at Rover

This is a guest post by Jerome Granados, CMO at GoodBarber

Beacons are the perfect tool to enhance UX, and providing an exciting user experience has always been at the core of GoodBarber. Offering features through the use of beacons had been at the back of our minds for quite some time when we decided to add it to our roadmap. We had a clear vision in mind, but first we had to find the right fit. Therefore, one crucial step was testing beacons from various manufacturers. Because GoodBarber delivers native apps for both iOS and Android, our goal was to find beacons that would work perfectly on both platforms. Estimote turned out to be a good choice since Estimote Beacons support both Apple iBeacon and Google’s Eddystone. If you’re not a developer but want to create an app that will deliver a rich mobile experience, this post is for you. Let me show you how to use our DIY native app builder with Estimote beacons.

When we imagined GoodBarber, our goal was to enable people to build quality apps at 1% of the price offered by agencies. To achieve that, we first focused on design. Each app made with GoodBarber should look unique and no one should be able to tell whether it was made with an app builder.

Today, I’m very proud when I see our users publish their beautiful apps. The last example I have in mind when writing this post is the app of the City of Ajaccio Museum. Among their app’s features, there is a smart audioguide. Every painting in the museum is assigned to a beacon. When users get close to a painting, they can listen to the audioguide. Deploying the app was very fast and required few resources. Moreover, the museum’s team, with no IT department, can still update the app by themselves and make it evolve over time thanks to the GoodBarber technology.

Now, let’s see how to use Estimote Beacons with your GoodBarber app.

1. Install the iBeacons add-on in your GoodBarber backend

When you create your app with GoodBarber, you get access to a backend where you are going to configure your project and install add-ons from the add-on library. It’s in this library that you will find the iBeacons add-on. After adding it to your project, you will be be able to build a geo alert strategy for your app.

2. Provide your UUID

Estimote Beacons ship with the same default UUID. Identify the UUID of one of your beacons using the Estimote app and copy it. Then paste the UUID in your GoodBarber backend, under Users > GeoAlerts > iBeacons > Settings.

Note that with GoodBarber, it’s only possible to manage a set of beacons with the same UUID. Be sure to assign the same UUID to all the beacons that will be used with your GoodBarber app.

3. Register and organize your beacons

Now it’s time to register your beacons in the backend. Assign a name to each beacon and don’t forget to provide its major and its minor.

You can now create your notifications scenarios and use the right trigger to ignite the conversation with the app users.

4. Create Notifications and associate them to your beacons

The next step is to create the notifications that will be displayed when app users will be in reach of one of your beacons.

GoodBarber provides a comprehensive interface to do it. After you’ve entered your message, you’ll be able to:

• select the action upon opening the notification. It can be opening the app, opening a deep link inside the app, or an external link.
• choose the notification sound
• target recipient, based on several criteria like being a registered user of your app, belonging to a specific group of users, using a specific device or operating system, having the phone in a specific language, etc.
• define the rule to trigger the notification. Will it be upon entering the area covered by the beacon, upon exiting this region, or dwelling inside for a specific amount of time? You can also decide if the notification should appear within a specific time range.
• attach the notification to one of your beacons and define the range of the action zone

5. Review your settings

A table gives you an overview of all the messages you have created and the beacons associated with them. You can decide to turn a notification on or off. You can also check the stats associated with each notification. You will see how many times it has been displayed and clicked, so you can improve your message for better engagement.

6. Enjoy!

I hope you’ll be as excited as I was when I received my first Estimote Beacons. I configured a notification strategy very quickly and was able to run it after releasing an update to my app. If set up properly, beacon notifications are among the most useful you can use. If you are imaginative, you can increase your conversions with such a powerful tool.

Jerome Granados, CMO at GoodBarber

Software applications of the future will not be developed just for mobile phones, tablets or desktop computers. They will not be optimized for Android, iOS or Windows. They won’t be tested to run on Chrome and Safari, or in portrait and landscape mode.

Apps of the future will be designed and developed for the physical world, for spaces and locations full of people, tied to intelligent connected objects, smart buildings, and maybe even autonomously moving cars and drones.

New software languages will be invented. New job titles for real-world developers will emerge. Engineers and designers will leave their desks and screens. They will design and develop experiences on-site, walking around the space using their bodies and gestures, crafting perfect real-time context for notifications, experiences and interactions. The physical world will be the new canvas for developers.

The mobile phones that people carry around will use an emergent physical layer to talk to sensors which are incorporated into ordinary objects. Beacons will be integrated into walls, allowing venues to seamlessly communicate with users. Altogether this new network will create a new type of virtual machine, a sort of standardized software stack that apps will run on top of, and can be duplicated and copied from one venue to another, e.g. from one airport to the new one, from one retailer in the US to another retailer in Europe etc.

Retail will become software-defined and stores will turn into inventory-less showrooms where visitors can add goods to virtual carts just by touching or interacting with them. Consumers will decide which part of the showroom they want to recreate in their home and the moment they leave store items will be shipped to their location. Future retail experience will be personal and will resemble the best experiences known today from museums or exhibitions.

How do we know the future?

Because we’re helping create it. Over the past two years more than 50,000 developers representing the world’s best agencies, Fortune 500 companies, and startups have used our products and software stack to rapidly innovate inside their real-world businesses.

The world’s largest retailers have built amazing experiences and beautiful apps that are drawing people to stores and helping them search, navigate and find merchandise in ways that were only possible online.

FC Barcelona, one of the world’s top sports clubs, is using beacons at their home arena to connect with their most engaged fans. Supporters visiting Camp Nou receive location-relevant information including promotions and tickets.

Varier Furniture, a Norwegian furniture company incorporated sticker beacons into their beautifully designed chairs during the manufacturing process; a companion mobile app enabled their customers to engage with their products in a completely new way.

The Guggenheim Museum in New York is displaying contextual information about nearby art and even remembers your most favorite paintings when you leave.

Passengers visiting Hamad International Airport are now one click away from precise navigation that can lead them to their gate and check them in. That’s because Qatar Airways has equipped the airport with a network of Estimote Beacons.

Innovations we brought to market last year

2015 saw an acceleration of new deployments across many verticals, made possible thanks to our robust software stack, code that we obsess about shipping to our community of developers every month.

Our list of software was already long in 2014 and we added much more last year, shipping tons of improvements and updates across our entire stack. Here are some of the most important ones:

• Infrastructure Sharing made it possible to open private beacon network to third-party app developers and experiment with cross promotion or new monetization models
• Flip to sleep saved developers time and effort by simulating enter and exit events
• Real-time analytics gave a new powerful tool to measure key project metrics
• Remote fleet management allowed to configure large beacon networks at scale
• Indoor Location made it possible to locate users down to 1.5m precision
• Updated Android Stack brought the latest innovations to our Android community
• Eddystone support allowed broadcasting of URLs in the new beacon format from Google
• Improved security introduced new layer of security for final deployments
• Location Intelligence Platform enabled location tracking of objects in the physical world
• App Templates streamlined the app prototyping and demoing process

Plans for 2016 and a welcome to our new partners

At Estimote our mission is to help developers and innovators delight mobile users with magical experiences. We focus on streamlining development and deployment processes by creating something we love to call an ‘OS for the physical world’, a real breakthrough in how software is built. And changing the world is much easier with great partners.

That’s why we are happy to announce our $10.7M Series A investment round today led by Javelin Venture Partners with participation from Digital Garage, Homebrew, Box Group, Commerce Ventures, Josh McFarland (Founder and CEO of TellApart) and a strong group of strategic angel investors.

We are excited for Noah and Alex from Javelin to join our board and help us build the future of contextual computing. Noah previously co-founded Keyhole and directed Google’s enterprise product line for geo-spatial products, Google Earth and Google Maps. Alex co-founded ooma (NYSE: OOMA) and brings strong consumer hardware and software experience. The investment will help us to accelerate innovation and expand our operations in New York, in our European office in Krakow and expand our San Francisco office.

Thank you for staying with us and we look forward to an incredible year ahead!

Jakub Krzych, Steve Cheney, Lukasz Kostka - Founders of Estimote

The holy grail of contextual computing is accurate and scalable indoor location. We’ve been on the quest to bring it to you for over a year already and are excited to announce another milestone: new version of our Indoor Location app with vastly improved reliability and a way to map much larger and more complex locations than ever before.

Try the new app today. It’s already available in the App Store.

Location, location, indoor location

Many of us couldn’t imagine everyday life without Google Maps, Uber, or Foursquare. Such location-based services proliferated only because accurate mapping outdoors became possible thanks to GPS, satellite imager, and location frameworks natively built into iOS and Android. But satellite imagery doesn’t cut it for retail stores, airports, hospitals, and other indoor spaces - and so the potential for hyperlocal, context-aware technology remains enormous.

Indoor location is notoriously hard. First, you need to come up with a way to create the map. Are you going to use Bluetooth beacons? Optical scanning? Digitized floorplans? Once you’ve made your decision on a preferred method, you need technical personnel to actually take care of the mapping. Done? Cool, now you can figure out how to convert your map to a machine-friendly format that will also play well within the framework with which you’re developing.

Or, you can spend five minutes using the Estimote Indoor Location app.

Today’s release features a brand-new, robust mapping process. We made it more stable, more accurate, and easier to complete. It also supports locations with complex shapes up to hundreds of square meters in size. We’re particularly excited about that last improvement, as support for bigger spaces was the most popular request from our developer community. The new app will first ask you to simply walk around your location to take some initial measurements. Then it will suggest the number of beacons you’ll need for best performance, along with instructions on proper placement. After that you should attach the beacons to your walls and take another walk for the Indoor Location app to save their exact position. Voila, you’re done! The whole process shouldn’t take more than few minutes.

Every location is automatically saved in Estimote Cloud, where you can adjust the shape and size by dragging and dropping the corners. In other words: don’t worry if the map doesn’t look perfect, you can fine-tune the dimensions anytime. And finally, each saved location is ready to work with Estimote Indoor Location SDK. You can immediately start working on putting it in your app.

But will it scale?

We know what you’re thinking. What if I have 100 locations to map? Do I have to run laps around each of them? And what if my location is not hundreds, but thousands, or tens of thousands of square meters? In other words: will it scale?

First things first: Indoor Location app is not the only mapping tool for Estimote Beacons. The Estimote Indoor Location SDK comes with a handy class called LocationBuilder. With LocationBuilder you can create a location of any shape and size programmatically. Just provide the X/Y coordinates for location corners and beacon placement, and you’re done. So if you believe a programmatic approach will scale better, no worries, we’ve got you covered.

When it comes to mapping XXL locations, we’re working on that as well. Look out for updates from Estimote in the weeks ahead, because other big announcements regarding Indoor Location are coming soon. Stay tuned and let us know what you think about the new Indoor Location app on Twitter or drop us a line to share your thoughts.

And don’t forget to test the new app!

Wojtek Borowicz, Community Evangelist at Estimote

We need it to scale better to work in very large spaces. We’ve been hearing that feedback a lot since we launched Indoor Location SDK back in 2014. No wonder: airports, shopping malls, hospitals, these are all huge locations and very challenging settings for indoor positioning technology. That’s why we’re so excited to announce an update to the Estimote Indoor Location SDK that not only easily scales to spaces of any size, but also does so in an incredibly efficient manner.

You can try it now by switching on the new Indoor Light positioning mode in settings.

What’s new?

So far Indoor Location only allowed for placing beacons along a location’s perimeter. This severely limited positioning performance in larger spaces. With the latest version of the app and SDK that’s no longer an issue. Now you can also add beacons inside the location and scale it to any size. To achieve that, we put much more focus on calculations based on beacons’ signals than on other factors used in the previous version of the algorithm. It comes with the added benefit of improved efficiency. Indoor Location is now lighter on CPU and battery usage. And that’s still not all! The Light mode also adds support for iPod and iPad, something museums and galleries in particular were asking for.

The approach we’ve taken requires some trade-offs. With positioning based mostly on beacons, we had to sacrifice the responsiveness of the original positioning mode. In practice, instead of a user’s avatar moving fluidly around the map, you will see it snapping between positions. So rather than saying the user is in this exact point, it tells you: the user is somewhere around here. In other words, you get improved stability but with less responsiveness. With beacons placed every 6 meters, the accuracy is 3 meters on average.

That’s why switching to the new positioning mode is optional while we’re working on bringing the same scalability and efficiency to the standard, more responsive positioning. The new mode is called Indoor Light and you can easily enable it for every location. Yes, it’s backward compatible with existing locations.

If you’re wondering whether original Indoor Location or Indoor Light is the best choice for your use case… try both: switching between them is pretty easy and we explain it below. But the rule of thumb is: the larger the space, the more important stability becomes. Indoor Light really starts to shine in locations bigger than 250 square meters. Our friends from Cuseum, who had early access to the beta version, can confirm that:

I recently tested the Indoor Light SDK in both a small (30'x30’) and larger space (50'x50’). The calibration was definitely the smoothest I’ve seen for indoor location with iBeacons. Additionally, the fact that we can get extended battery life with general location within a space is very exciting. I look forward to using Indoor Light more in the near future and introducing this to our museum and cultural partners!

said Zach Reiner, Product Lead at Cuseum.

Turn it on

You just need to open the Indoor Location app and tap on user profile icon in the top right corner. Then switch the navigation mode to Light. You can also do it with the SDK. The positioning mode is independent from building the location, so you can always switch to see what fits you best. Note: right now to create a location with beacons in the middle, you need to do it the SDK’s LocationBuilder. In case you haven’t used it yet, here’s a guide.

Go ahead and give Indoor Light a go. And don’t forget to tell us how you like it on the forums, on Twitter, and via email!

Wojtek Borowicz, Community Evangelist at Estimote

More than two years ago, developers around the world received the first Estimote Development Kits and started experimenting with proximity, microlocation, and contextual computing. We were the first company to ship iBeacon-compatible beacons with rich mobile SDKs, and the first that enabled Eddystone through an over-the-air update. Over the last two years we have continued to innovate, bringing to the market tiny Estimote Stickers and the Nearable packet, Indoor Location SDK, Cloud-based fleet management and more.

We also lead the way with commercial deployments at unprecedented scale. Over the last couple of months, we took all the lessons and experiences of the industry, and turned it into a new, improved, and more robust product.

Today, we are happy to announce a new generation of beacons, introducing the Estimote Development Kit with Location Beacons. They come in three fun Estimote colors: Lemon Tart, Candy Floss, and Sweet Beetroot. They are also available in white for bulk orders.

We’ve always believed that beacons are tiny computers. With their firmware upgrade last year, all Estimote beacons were enabled to broadcast not only Apple iBeacon packets but also Eddystone, an open beacon format from Google. Because of the battery limitations it was possible to advertise only one beacon format at a time.

Simultaneous iBeacon and Eddystone packet advertising

To optimize battery consumption in the new beacons, we have completely rewritten the entire firmware from scratch. New beacons are able to broadcast multiple packets (iBeacon, Eddystone, Estimote Telemetry) simultaneously. Innovators building their beacon networks shouldn’t worry about beacon formats and compatibility. That’s why our product will support them all, at the same time.

Extended battery life

As a result of power optimization with the new product, we have extended battery life up to 7 years on default settings, and up to 3 years in iBeacon mode with broadcasting settings cranked up for maximum performance. Thanks to the built-in Real-Time Clock and ambient light sensor, battery life can be extended up to 10 years with power management tools, including scheduled advertising, Dark To Sleep mode, and Smart Power mode.

Telemetry and Connection-less Sensor Data

Being able to advertise multiple packets at the same time, we couldn’t resist bringing more context to our mobile SDK and have thus created robust telemetry packets. All new Estimote Location Beacons can advertise non-connectable Estimote Telemetry packets, consisting of sensor data (temperature, motion, light, magnetometer, GPIO) and battery level. The SDK can read and parse these on the fly.

Generic Advertiser and GPIO

With the redesigned firmware, new beacons are capable of much more than only broadcasting existing beacon formats. With Generic Advertiser, it is possible for developers to create their own beacon formats and data structure. Thanks to the built-in General Purpose Input Output (GPIO) it is also possible to prototype connected objects, and feed advertisers with external device data. Prototyping a smart door lock, connected lamp, or intelligent fridge with the new Estimote Dev Kit will be easy like never before.

Improved form-factor

Building an online-offline bridge requires not only software innovations, but improvements in the form factor and an obsession with large-scale deployments. All the new beacons have a built-in intelligent adhesive tape layer. It sticks to any surface, and for the first 45 minutes beacons can be removed and repositioned freely. After that time, beacons will stick permanently.

Manufacturing millions of devices means accounting for the environment. Enclosures of the new beacons are constructed with silicone. It is resistant to extreme conditions and temperatures, and is 100% recyclable at designated recycling plants. That’s why with the new form-factor it’s much easier to open the beacon and remove parts for utilization.

Enterprise deployment ready

With the rewritten firmware, we have completely redesigned the security architecture. This means improved authentication and a new firmware upgrade mechanism. New beacons have been already tested with massive commercial deployments and are available for bulk orders. Thanks to the new manufacturing process, it is possible to pre-configure beacons with UUID, Tx power and other settings before shipping.

So many innovations - exactly the same price

The new generation of Estimote Location Beacons will have the same price as the previous generation and will cost $99 for 3 beacons in the dev kit. You can pre-order them now on our website and we will be shipping the first batches this March .

Our previous product–now called Estimote Proximity Beacon–are the most popular beacons for developers. We will continue to sell and support them, and their price will be changed to $59 for a dev kit. You can order them right now, and we are shipping on a daily basis.

Both beacon types are also currently available for bulk orders. If you’re interested in volume pricing, contact our business team.

Full feature list

To summarize - today we are launching the most robust beacons on the market with the following features:

• 7 years default battery life (3 years in iBeacon mode)
• Simultaneous advertising of iBeacon, Eddystone, and additional packets (with different broadcasting power and advertising interval)
• Estimote Telemetry packets (sensor data, GPIO, battery status)
• Generic Advertiser with custom packets capability
• Built-in sensors (temperature, motion, light, magnetometer)
• Additional 1Mb EEPROM memory
• Conditional Broadcasting (Flip to Sleep, Dark to Sleep)
• Separate connectivity packet (advertising iBeacon/Eddystone while connected)
• Improved secure authentication and software update
• Real-Time Clock & scheduled advertising (radio off outside business hours)
• GPIO slot for prototyping connected objects
• Pre-configuration during manufacturing (packet types, IDs, Tx power and other parameters configurable during ordering)
• Shipped with brand new SDK 4.0 for iOS and Android
• Full Indoor Location SDK support
• Compatibility with Estimote Cloud and remote management
• Intelligent prototyping and deployment adhesive tape
• Water resistant and eco-friendly reusable enclosures

If you want to play with the new beacons, go ahead and pre-order today on our website to be included in the first shipping batch.

You can also meet us this week and see our demos at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Have you ever imagined how the workspace of the future would look like? Now you have a chance to build it yourself! We’re excited to announce the latest edition of our RealityHack open source app contest, partnering with Slack. The folks that brought you the coolest team communication platform around will be helping us pick the very best project.

Build an app that makes Estimote Beacons or Stickers work with Slack platform to win fame, glory, and (of course) amazing prizes! The developer (or team) behind the winning app gets an awesome Internet of Things hacker pack (including next generation Estimote Location Beacons, Flic button, Particle Maker Kit, Pocket Operator, Intel Edison, and Proto-X SLT drone), and a ton of swag from Estimote and Slack.

RealityHack Challenge #3: Reinvent the Workplace starts today, and is open for submissions until April 10th. For details, visit the contest page and read on.

Rules & The Good Stuff

We want you to think of the most creative ways to make Estimote Beacons or Stickers work together with Slack to create a better office. Employ a bot to check room occupancy with beacons, build a conversational UI to track objects that go missing way too often, leave digital Post-It notes for colleagues in specific areas of the office, you name it!

The requirements are simple:

• Create an open source mobile app for iOS or Android to be used in the workplace
• Make sure it integrates Estimote SDK and Slack API
• Shoot a short video of the app in action
• Send your submission, consisting of a link to the video and link to the app to realityhack@estimote.com by 11:59 PM PST April 10th

The best projects may even be published as App Templates in Estimote Cloud and in Slack’s Community Integrations directory so that developers worldwide can utilize them! The winning project, chosen by Estimote and Slack teams, will also receive:

• Fame and glory! Estimote and Slack will promote the project in their channels
• a super duper hacker pack including: next generation Estimote Location Beacons, Flic button, Particle Maker Kit, Pocket Operator, Intel Edison, and Proto-X SLT drone
• Swag to show off and brag to all your friends… you are the winner!

No purchase necessary. For the full terms and conditions, head over here.

We can’t wait to see the kind of useful and exciting Slack apps you build incorporating Estimote beacons. We imagine many useful integrations from the office space, to conferences, to retail shops. Show us what’s happening in the world!

Taylor Singletary, Slack Developer Relations

We hope to see a lot of amazing ideas combining Estimote and Slack. Go for it, and show us your brilliant solution! If you have any questions, just drop us a line.

Good luck and don’t forget to visit the RealityHack website.

Wojtek Borowicz, Community Evangelist at Estimote

We recently launched Estimote Location Beacons: our new flagship hardware with a host of exciting additions. They’ll start shipping later this month, but the SDK with support for all the new goodies is already out on GitHub. Over the next few weeks we’ll be publishing posts detailing particular features introduced with Location Beacons and SDK 4.0.

Today, we’re kicking off with an overview of the new stuff. Read on for details and don’t forget to take a look at the SDK; it’s available both on iOS and Android.

What’s new?

One of the key improvements introduced with Location Beacons is the ability to broadcast multiple data packets simultaneously. Below is a full list of formats supported by Estimote Location Beacons:

• iBeacon
• Eddystone-UID
• Eddystone-URL
• Eddystone-TLM
• Estimote Connectivity
• Estimote Location
• Estimote Telemetry

You can enable and disable the packets at will. And it’s not just that: you can also set different settings for Tx Power (range) and Advertising Interval for different packets. SDK 4.0 already supports that and Estimote app will as well with the next release.

To give you a glimpse of the Estimote packets you might have not known before:

Estimote Connectivity

The only connectable packet in the bunch. It’s used to identify the device and enable you to write new settings to beacons and update firmware. It’s also designed in such a way that when you’re connected to a beacon, it can still broadcast non-connectable packets. You cannot deactivate Estimote Connectivity.

Estimote Telemetry

Comprises sensor data, GPIO status, battery level, and firmware version. Will come very handy in fleet management and in cases requiring more context than just proximity.

Estimote Location

A custom packet designed around proximity. Just like iBeacon and Eddystone-UID it consists of a device identifier, but comes with an additional boon these two lack. Estimote Location includes additional information useful for estimating proximity. In the future we’ll use this both in our standard SDK and in Indoor Location SDK to improve accuracy.

All three Estimote packets can be detected in the background on both iOS and Android.

Another huge addition is the Configuration template. It’s an app template built on top of SDK 4.0 designed to make deploying a large amount of beacons much easier. The Configuration template includes off-the-shelf code & UI to govern how field personnel change beacons’ settings from their default values to ones specific to your deployment. This includes every physical setting of the beacon, and even a new and improved firmware update flow. And, as with all our app templates, it’s fully customizable to your specific needs. You can find the Configuration template in Estimote Cloud.

You’ll notice that configuring beacons and updating firmware is now blazing fast, thanks to SDK 4.0 and Location Beacons’ new firmware. Those improvements, combined with the Configuration template, means it’s now quicker and more efficient than ever to roll out hundreds and even thousands of beacons.

One more thing that will come in handy when installing beacons at scale are Conditional Broadcasting and Scheduled Advertising. Conditional Broadcasting isn’t new, because you were already able to ’mute’ your beacons by turning them upside-down, but Location Beacons introduce a new mode called Dark to Sleep. You guessed just right: thanks to the built-in ambient light sensor, beacons will stop broadcasting if the light in a room drops below a certain threshold. Scheduled Advertising is based on the built-in Real-Time Clock in Location Beacons and lets you specify times in which a beacon should go mute to conserve battery life, e.g., during the hours a store is closed.

Those of you with the souls of hardware hackers will also love GPIO support. The SDK (app update coming soon) allows you to configure the GPIO connector in Location Beacons as input, output, or UART interface. The last one can be used to define your custom data packets to broadcast alongside the predefined ones.

That’s a broad overview of what’s new and in the coming weeks we’ll be delving deeper into each of these individual features. We hope you love them and as always, you can share your thoughts on Twitter or via email.

Wojtek Borowicz, Community Evangelist at Estimote

This is a guest post by Alexandru Chiuariu, an Inbound Marketer at Beaglecat

Airports and bus terminals can be very confusing, especially for first-time travelers. One way to go around this is to use indoor maps, and while not all buildings come with one, beacons make the implementation far easier than it used to be. Indoor mapping was typically done using expensive, complex equipment, but beacons solve both of those problems by being both affordable and easy to understand. On top of that, they represent a low-energy solution, meaning that you won’t have to carry a power bank with you at all time while your smartphone communicates with them. Otherwise, they could have represented a problem, as TSA has banned unpowered devices on some international flights. By combining Beacons with custom-made apps, travel agencies and airlines can streamline the entire customer experience, while also making the interaction more personal.

The Airport Lounges of the Future Are Already Here

Airports feature a fair share of technology, but some have taken things to the next level by integrating beacons in lounges. Assuming that you turn on Bluetooth and opt-in to share your location, apps can provide you with relevant information. It ultimately depends on what the companion app displays, but some useful details include directions to boarding gates and restaurants, flight status, baggage claim, and offers from the Duty Free shops.

Dubai’s Hamad International Airport has recently developed and launched an app powered by Estimote Beacons to guide their customers more efficiently through the labyrinth that a modern day airport can be. The First and Business Class lounge at San Francisco International Airport have also been upgraded with beacons, fact that has enabled customers to receive real-time information about the daily menus, an overview of the lounge’s amenities, and the option to check into social media.

Beacons Also Make Checking Into Hotels a Lot Easier

Using a similar approach to the one employed in airports, hotels can provide an augmented personalized experience that will ultimately improve the way customers perceive them. Regarded as the next big tech advance in hospitality, the Beacon technology can take many forms, and each hotel chain is looking for a different implementation that will help it stand out from the crowd.

GuestDriven’s Mobile Guest Engagement Platform, a solution that has been adopted by James Hotels early last year, brings customers closers to hoteliers. Estimote Beacons placed near the key points of the hotel, namely at the entrance, reception desk, hotel spa, bar, or restaurant, provide customers with valuable contextual information, including daily menus and notifications regarding reservations. This represents an easy way for hotels to push special offers to customers’ smartphones in a manner that’s definitely more entertaining than restaurant boards and the like.

Social Media Can Add Yet Another Dimension to the Beacon Technology

Are you passing by a restaurant in an airport, and the Beacon pushes you the daily menu? But what if the food served on that particular day is not to your taste? Social logins can help with that. Assuming that on the social network you’ve used for logging in you mentioned your favorite foods, it might be possible for the app to scrap the relevant data and put it in context. While it may be more difficult to find out someone’s gastronomic preferences, it’s far easier when it comes to music and movies. Beacons could redefine in-flight entertainment, if the app takes into account what each flyer enjoys watching or listening to. This way, airlines could tailor each customer’s experience in a unique manner.

There are many ways beacons could improve our lives and the imagination of the people developing apps for them is the only limit. In fact, there are many uses out there that developers haven’t thought of, yet, but as beacons are gaining more ground, the opportunities will reveal themselves. Travel is only one of the industries that will benefit enormously from proximity marketing. As more and more people become smartphone users, beacons and apps for them will start gaining traction, thus encouraging the progress of more related industries.

Alexandru Chiuariu is an Inbound Marketer at Beaglecat, an internet marketing agency specialized in lead generation for companies in Western Europe and the US. For more internet marketing tips and trends, download Beaglecat’s latest report.

Museums are changing. Many of them, with interactive installations, companion apps, and digital content, have gone through complete transformation over the years. New York’s Brooklyn Museum is at the forefront of this process. Their latest project, the ASK app, uses beacons to let visitors ask the staff about nearby exhibits. An ambitious project, months in the making, is coming to Android this week.

We sat down with Shelley Bernstein, Vice Director of Digital Engagement & Technology at Brooklyn Museum, to ask (pun intended) her about making museums digital and employing location context.

Why did Brooklyn Museum build ASK?

Shelley Bernstein: We had done some really forward thinking digital projects over the years. Visitors liked them, came to expect it from us, but there wasn’t a lot of consistency because programs were designed to run for a little while and then they were gone. We started to have meetings about what a digital program might look like if it was something available all the time. We started out with some goals, but we committed ourselves to letting visitors drive what would become the end product.

Did you learn anything new in the process about your patrons and about the technology? Maybe even about the museum itself?

In the content development stage, we designed a series of pilot projects to try and figure out more about visitor behavior and what they were seeking. In one pilot, we put staff on the floor just to see what visitors asked them. Turns out they wanted to have conversations about art and they wanted to know what to see next; conversations could be five minutes or more. Simply put, we found our visitors wanted conversation and they wanted a fully dynamic response that suited their needs very individually. We started to realize that a chat app that would allow direct access to our experts and could scale better than having staff on hand in every gallery. The beacons then let our staff of experts “see” which works of art a visitor is standing near.

And how do people like it? What are the reactions?

I think we’re the only five-star rated museum app in iTunes and the reviews have been really encouraging down to people remembering the names of the ASK team who answered their questions. Reviews are reiterating all those things we learned in early pilots including personal connection, specificity to their needs, and looking at art more closely. It’s pretty fantastic when someone says, “It was like finding Easter eggs!” in an app review.

Anything surprised you in the way Brooklyn Museum patrons engage with ASK?

It’s the funniest thing; they just don’t believe us when we tell them real people are going to answer their questions. It takes a few exchanges in the app and then you can see the light bulb go off; there’s this great “a ha” moment when they figure out what’s happening.

The stats, too, point to a deeply engaged audience. Conversations can last the entire duration of someone’s three hour visit and beacon data is showing us that 20% of our user base are asking questions in six or more galleries.

Does building a museum app make you think about an exhibition in a way people in tech view products? Can a museum be a product in this sense?

In this particular case, we reversed the formula. ASK is an app that is just as important to the Museum as its users because people using it have the ability to help us create a more responsive museum through their own dialog. As an example, we have three galleries—Egyptian, European, and American—that are re-opening this spring with a refreshed look and feel. All have been informed in some way by the thousands of questions visitors have been asking because curators have been regularly reviewing the conversations taking place via the app.

Does this mean you’re going to further iterate on the contents of exhibitions based on feedback received via conversations in the app?

Curators are looking at ASK conversations to see if the curatorial vision is being understood among audience. When the conversations show that tweaks can be made to make their visions clearer to the public, they’ve been all for it. Those may be small, incremental changes like re-thinking a work of art’s label text for clarity or message. In the case of these recent gallery refreshes it’s meant somewhat larger changes in how the space is installed. It’s pretty cool to think that visitor driven conversation is helping the institution learn about what’s working (and what isn’t) and what that can mean for a better visitor experience overall.

ASK is coming to Android this week. What’s in store for the future? More work with mobile and beacons?

The biggest thing we’ll be working on are optimizations for the ASK team and our curatorial staff. We’re going to start using beacon locations combined with image recognition to make the process of delivering what a visitor is looking at even more seamless. We’ll also be thinking about leveraging things like Elasticsearch to deliver better reports to curators, so they can more easily surface trends in the questions being asked about their objects.

What surprised us at Estimote, was how early museums started testing and adopting iBeacon. This technology was touted as the next big thing in retail and marketing but found a huge user base in culture sector. Why?

Museums have a lot of problems in common with retail; essentially, we want to be able to get people to product (in our case, that’s art) with as little friction as possible. Beacons solve a lot of problems because you can build quickly and experiment. From an infrastructure perspective, you don’t need to deal with wiring and power in what are often incredibly old buildings that don’t have easy ways to get cabling through walls. As an aside, we’ve seen so much demand within the industry for beacon projects that we open sourced all our mobile side code related to beacons, so that other institutions could build more quickly and easily.

Here in tech we like to think that we are important and we’re changing the world, be it retail, travel, or art. But how much do museums really think about technology? Is it just a side note for most organizations, or is tech core to the future of museums?

In recent years, we’ve been seeing institutions re-organizing structure to think about how technology can help foster an end-to-end visitor experience. Technology is becoming more core to what museums do and colleagues are being charged with taking a more holistic approach that closely follows mission-driven thinking. The outlook is a great one and pretty darn exciting!

Wojtek Borowicz, Community Evangelist at Estimote