In March we’ve released SDK 4.0 with a host of killer features designed specifically for Location Beacons. New beacons are already shipping (by the way: give them a try and order a devkit) so we want to show you what you can accomplish with them and SDK 4.0. Today, we’re covering Configuration template that makes it easier than ever to deploy and monitor beacons at scale.

The new SDK is available on GitHub for both iOS and Android, so you can check it out anytime.

Configure, scan, go!

Throughout the last year, we’ve made a lot of progress with simplifying large-scale deployments. We released Fleet Management API and remote management features in Estimote Cloud, and now we’re giving you another tool. The Configuration template started as an internal project to help with some of our largest retail deployments. It was stunning to see how much easier it made the installation and configuration stage. We had to ask ourselves: why can’t everyone use this to help them with beacon projects? So it’s battle-tested and dead simple to use. The Configuration template allows you to adjust settings, identify beacons, and monitor their health on the fly. It will come in handy when you need to install 100 beacons in a store in a couple of hours or need to check if the 300 devices you’ve set up for an event next day are all up and running.

You can go to Estimote Cloud and give it a go right now. It is also available as part of the SDK’s Examples.

After you download Configuration template, you’ll notice that it actually consists of two apps: Configuration and Scanner. The former automatically scans for the nearest beacon and opens the config screen. You can build yourself a nice little factory line and quickly go through the whole fleet, or you can install beacons first and then just make a round through the venue applying new settings. After you connect to a beacon, you can edit tags, change aisle numbers, adjust range, and check ID and geolocation. In case you’re wondering what we mean by aisles: the Configuration template was designed for retailers, but you can think of this field as a way to mark beacons’ location inside your venue.

Bonus: Location Beacons have LED diodes that blink red when you’re connected. Ergo, no more wondering which beacon you’ve just edited. And icing on the cake: every time you configure a beacon this way, the app will also check for available firmware updates. And since the firmware file is cached in the config app and Location Beacons are running a redesigned firmware that’s much faster to install, it’s the easiest way to update tens or hundreds of units.

Scanner comes in handy when you need to check up on the installed beacons. Early in the project you might not know what to expect. How dense should the beacon setup be? How does the environment affect range? Is there signal bleed between adjacent regions at -12 dBm Broadcasting Power? Scanner shows you a list of nearby beacons, with RSSI readings, tags, and aisle numbers. A quick walk through your venue with Scanner app open is the best way to make sure your setup is able to deliver a killer contextual experience.

To sum it up: it’s one template, two apps, and a lot less work to do when installing beacons.

Build you own configuration app

Every deployment is different, so it’s possible that you will need something more than the default version of Configuration template. That’s exactly why it’s a template, not a standalone application. It gives you full access to the code and just like the other App Templates, it’s extensible and adjustable. Need the configuration app to edit Advertising Interval? A few additional lines and it’s done. No aisles in your venue? Just replace them with another custom field. Want the scanner to show additional details on the list? That’s easy, too.

On top of all that you can hook up the config app with your own backend so that all information will be saved there. Neat, huh?

Give Configuration template a try and let us know how you like it! Find us on Twitter or ping contact@estimote.com.

Wojtek Borowicz, Community Evangelist at Estimote

Recently we introduced our new Location Beacons. Wondering what’s coming next? You already know about SDK 4.0, so it’s time to talk about the Indoor Location SDK and how Location Beacons bring new opportunities to explore it.

We are thrilled to announce that Indoor Location now works in the background. What exactly does this mean? Position tracking is possible even when the app is not actively running. And it’s already available in the App Store, give it a try!

Now you see me

Indoor navigation finds its use across many industries such as retail, hospitality, event management, and more.

But here’s the question: how do I make sure people are actually using my app so I can locate them? We might be more and more involved with our smartphones, but there are times when they just rest in our pockets. What then? Just disappear from the map? Not exactly what we are aiming for, is it?

You kept asking us about this, so we made sure the position is not lost even when the app isn’t running. Now you can enable background mode in our Indoor app and you’ll be able to trail user movement in your saved location.

You can always tell the difference if user is looking at the app or it’s in the background. If it’s the latter, you’ll see a ghost avatar.

Don’t worry about the battery. We’ve made sure that energy consumption isn’t drastically affected, so you can expect something similar to iBeacon background monitoring.

How to enable Indoor Location in background?

Here’s what you need to try it out:

• Indoor app version 1.10

Update our Indoor app to the newest version and make sure to enable background mode in settings. Here’s how it looks like:

• Location Beacons

Your Indoor Location has to be mapped with Location Beacons. Remember that to create a location you need a minimum of four beacons (one per wall). You can get new Location Beacons here.

• Customized UUID

When you first receive your beacons, they all come with default UUID. To use Indoor Location in the background, please customize the UUID of your beacons.

• Public or your own location

Indoor positioning in background will work with every public location you are in as well as with locations you’ve created yourself.

There’s ton of new things you can do with Indoor Location now. It’s a great opportunity for shops, museums, and other public spaces that have Indoor Location implemented: the interaction with the visitor can be triggered even when they are not using the app at the moment. Listen to an audio guide as soon as you reach the sculpture or get a coupon when you’re right next to a product in a store.

The possibilities are countless and we are sure your imagination is already sparked.

We are eager to know how it goes for you, so try it out and share your experience on Twitter or via mail.

Liliya Matsuk, Community Manager at Estimote

At Estimote we take security of beacon infrastructure very seriously. Early on we introduced Secure UUID on top of iBeacon to prevent malicious use and spoofing of beacons. Many of our large enterprise customers and retailers are using it to make their infrastructure more secure.

Today we’re excited to announce extended security support for Eddystone, a new open BLE beacon format introduced by Google last year. To make Eddystone more secure, Google is releasing Ephemeral Identifiers (EIDs): a feature for encrypting beacon’s broadcast to prevent spoofing and piggybacking, which uses a similar rotating encryption scheme to what we offer for iBeacon. You can read more about it on Google’s blog.

EIDs are supported by recently launched Estimote Location Beacons. You can order them here.

Why do Estimote Beacons need Ephemeral IDs?

Beacons work by broadcasting their IDs over the air. If the ID is not encrypted, anyone with a Bluetooth device could just sniff it out and spoof (clone) your beacons. Imagine that you have a loyalty program for frequent visitors to your venue. With a spoofed beacon, someone could keep scoring rewards without leaving their couch. Piggybacking is even worse: it’s when your competitor integrates your beacons in their app, so that anytime someone visits your location, the competitor’s app notifies them about a special deal somewhere else.

Not cool, right? We’ve thought a lot about protecting against those threats. iBeacon users can prevent them with Estimote Secure UUID. It is already a part of some of the world’s largest iBeacon deployments to date. But what if you’re not using iBeacon but Eddystone instead? That’s where EIDs come in. Below we describe EIDs in more detail. If you’re not yet familiar with how Eddystone works, first take a look at our Developer Portal.

In theory, Eddystone-EID is the fourth frame supported by the Eddystone protocol, alongside Eddystone-UID, Eddystone-URL, and Eddystone-TLM. With our implementation, you can think of it more as a security plugin to Eddystone-UID. To use EIDs, Estimote Beacons need to be registered in Google Cloud. Then, if EIDs are enabled, beacons will not broadcast their real Namespace and Instance values. Instead, they will transmit seemingly random IDs, changing them on regular intervals. To resolve the real Eddystone-UID (combination of Namespace and Instance) you need to use an SDK from Estimote or Google. Every time your app receives an encrypted ID, it will fetch data from Google Proximity Beacon API associated with the real ID. Since connection is authorized and encrypted, you don’t need to worry about someone else being able to identify your beacons.

Sounds familiar? That’s because it is: rotating and ephemeral are effectively the same method. Secure UUID protects iBeacon by randomizing the UUID, Major, and Minor. Ephemeral IDs do the same for Eddystone beacons. If you want to learn more, visit our Knowledge Base.

How to turn on Ephemeral IDs in Eddystone

To enable EIDs on Estimote Location Beacons, you will need to do that via Estimote SDK or via Google Proximity Beacon API and Eddystone GATT Service coming in the next firmware release. Head to our Developer Portal for in-depth tutorial.

Please note that EIDs require an internet connection to work since Estimote’s SDK needs to send a request to the cloud to resolve the real Eddystone-UID. Also, Ephemeral ID only encrypts Eddystone-UID: it does not cover Eddystone-URL.

If you have any questions about Ephemeral ID or beacon security, find us on Twitter or shoot us an email.

Wojtek Borowicz, Community Evangelist at Estimote

Recently we’ve shown you how Configuration template can take some weight off your shoulders with large-scale beacon deployments. But that’s not all Estimote SDK 4.0 has for you in the fleet management department. There are two more nifty features enabled by Location Beacons and the new SDK: beacon telemetry and scheduled advertising.

Keep tabs on your beacons

Developers love Bluetooth Low-energy because of its efficiency and widespread adoption. However, BLE’s low power consumption comes with a caveat: the maximum data packet size is 22 bytes. Just enough to broadcast an iBeacon identifier or a shortened URL, but what about other information: sensor readings and battery level? You need to leave them out. And that’s bad news, because when retailers or owners of large venues (think stadiums, shopping malls, airports) start considering beacons, fleet management is one of the first concerns they raise. And rightly so. No one is going to invest thousands of dollars into new technical infrastructure if there is no way to maintain it.

Enter Location Beacons. One of the biggest improvements introduced in them is the ability to broadcast multiple data packets simultaneously. From fleet management perspective, this is huge. How so? All thanks to the Estimote Telemetry packet. Unlike other packets beacons can broadcast, Estimote Telemetry was designed specifically for the purpose of network maintenance.

Estimote Telemetry packet includes:

• battery level
• firmware version
• motion status and accelerometer readings (e.g. to alert you when the beacon has been misplaced)
• temperature
• level ambient light level (useful for saving battery life with conditional broadcasting) GPIO status (comes in handy when you’ve connected beacons to other devices and want to know their status)

It’s connectionless: to access data you only need to be in range of a beacon. That’s much faster than having to connect to each beacon to read and write its settings. And with the Scanner app, available as part of the Configuration template, you can be passing by beacons and see information update in real time—e.g., hunting for the one with outdated firmware

All according to schedule

SDK 4.0 introduces one more thing that will come in handy when managing big numbers of beacons. Location Beacons come with a Real-Time Clock onboard and you can use scheduled advertising to define when beacons should remain active. So if your store is only open between 6 AM and 10 PM, there’s no reason to have beacons broadcasting outside this range. It’s a clever way to save battery life, especially if you’re using many data packets at the same time or using power-hungry settings.

Protip: you can still use Smart Power Mode, which slows down advertising if there are no people near the beacon, to save the battery during the opening, but low-traffic hours. And it requires no programming!

Protip #2: conditional broadcasting is not limited to Real-Time Clock. It can use data from accelerometer and ambient light sensor as well, so you can make beacons activate based on motion and exposure to light. It comes handy for testing and configuration before the production deployment. For example, you can use Flip to Sleep to simulate enter and exit region events without having to leave the beacon’s range.

That’s it for today. Let us know what you think on Twitter and have fun playing with SDK 4.0 and Location Beacons. If you don’t have them yet… here is a way to fix that.

Wojtek Borowicz, Community Evangelist at Estimote

In February we asked you to build an open source app that integrates Estimote Beacons or Stickers with Slack API. RealityHack #3 was all about ideas for an office that’s both smarter and more fun to work at. We loved the projects you submitted but there can be only one winner, so without further delay… that winner is:

Note.cntxt by Donnie Propst and Adam Stone.

Congrats guys! You win our awesome gadget pack with Estimote Location Beacons, Flic button, Particle Maker Kit, Pocket Operator, Intel Edison, and Proto-X SLT drone. Plus, swag from Estimote and Slack. Expect a postman knocking on your door soon. Big thanks to you and all the other participants: we hope you had as much fun building the apps as we had testing them.

Good job RealityHackers!

Note.cntxt won because it addresses a problem many businesses are struggling with: work/life balance. Sometimes an idea comes to your mind well after working hours. Or you suddenly realize what was that you didn’t remember at the office. It’s tempting to message someone RIGHT NOW and disrupt their evening, isn’t it? With Note.cntxt, you can send people notes via Slack anytime without pushing them to work overtime. They will only receive the message when in range of the Estimote Beacon at their desk. Neat, huh?

We also want to shout out to some other participants. RealityHack is an open source contest, so that thousands of developers who want to try building apps with Estimote Beacons can access resources for inspiration and education. And there is a lot to learn and to be inspired from.

Help Desk by Romin Imrani.

Printers and coffee machines: two devices that are essential to every office… and are also what nightmares are made of, when it comes to maintenance. Help Desk app lets you quickly report issues with workplace equipment to your Slack team, based on proximity to Estimote Beacons.

SlackBooking by Richard Doyle and Francois Delpech.

Room booking and availability is an idea that came up often among RealityHackers. Richard and Francois built a smart little app that handles this well. You can equip rooms with beacons and then check whether they’re occupied through Slack.

PreSense by Chay Choong, Chng Wei Sheng, Huang Jing Jie, and Joel Ang.

This one was designed for large, multi-story offices but what we love about PreSense is that it can also come in handy for teams working remotely. It lets you toggle your status between available, busy, and not present. Thanks to Estimote Beacons, presence is updated automatically and each team member’s status can be looked up in Slack. Additional points for having both iOS and Android apps.

SlackStatus by Paweł Brągoszewski.

SlackStatus is another app designed to help distributed teams keep track of status of team members. The app is sleek and uses Estimote Beacons to detect when you arrive at your desk. And the #status channel on Slack is a helpful feed of team activity.

You can also find links to all five mentioned projects on our Community Portal. Soon the Slack team picks will be listed among Slack’s community integrations, too!

I learned so much exploring these submissions. Many organizations would find value in these apps. The participants were obviously passionate about using beacon technology to improve working lives. The open source projects are inspiring examples of integrating your physical workplace with Slack to make your working life simpler, more pleasant and more productive.

Taylor Singletary, Slack Developer Relations

RealityHack #3 comes to a close. Thanks again to all participants and stay tuned for the next challenge. It’s coming soon and we’re gonna make it even more awesome!

Wojtek Borowicz, Community Evangelist at Estimote

This is a guest post by Jody Cumberpatch, Director of Marketing & Content at Stealz.

All businesses want to find new & innovative ways to engage with guests – especially if they improve customer satisfaction & encourage customer loyalty. However, many brick & mortar businesses lack sufficient resources (both human & financial) to dedicate to an elaborate strategy for closely managing customer relations/communications.

The automation capabilities of beacon technology can take the legwork out of creating & executing an engagement strategy that goes full-circle & sets a business apart from its competitors.

Solution: Stealz, Powered by Beacon Technology

Stealz is a mobile app that serves as an automated B2C engagement tool for restaurants/entertainment venues while doubling as a customer rewards program.

Stealz is focused on creating what we call an effective “Engagement Loop” for our client businesses. First, our app enhances a guest’s visit by giving them an easy way to get free rewards on every visit. This is a sure-fire way to improve customer satisfaction.

Next, Stealz focuses on helping a business maximize post-visit opportunities for engagement. We do this by collecting valuable customer data & displaying it on a Dashboard, where businesses can send customized marketing campaigns & respond to visit feedback in real-time. This brings the “Engagement Loop” full-circle by bringing a business’s customers back & inherently encouraging customer loyalty.

Estimote beacons play two key roles in helping Stealz establish this “Engagement Loop”:

Providing visit personalization for guests:

• Customizable beacon notifications give businesses a way to immediately welcome customers when they walk through the door – all on their smartphone, via Stealz.
• Customizable beacon notifications can also help businesses encourage behavioral buying habits through the Stealz app. (i.e. “Treat yourself by adding hand-spun milkshake to your order for $1.00!“)

Optimizing the app’s usability:

• Beacons help Stealz micro-locate a user & pinpoint their location when they’re within range (rather than relying on not-always-so-accurate GPS), making it super easy for them to check-in at a venue.
• Once a user is within range of a Stealz beacon that’s tied to a participating venue, they immediately unlock the ability to earn points & become a brand ambassador; specifically by checking-in, sharing photos on social media, and/or leaving feedback about their experience.

Stealz in action: Fast-Casual Restaurant Case Study

One of Stealz’s oldest clients is a Tex-Mex restaurant concept called Armadillo Grill. The owner employed Stealz with 2 main goals in mind: 1) establishing an effective way to personally welcome every customer that walks through the door, and 2) finding a creative way to reward her most loyal customers.

In 4 weeks at 2 Armadillo Grill restaurants, Stealz produced:

Stealz has provided similar results for almost 1,000 small & large businesses alike, including McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A, Taco Bell, KFC, Applebee’s and many others.

Stealz in action: Quick-Service Restaurant Case Study

One of Stealz’s largest-scale clients is McDonald’s. In addition to using Stealz to increase customer satisfaction & loyalty, the owners of participating stores have used Stealz to drive customer traffic with special promotions. This year, one owner created a customized promotion just for Valentine’s Day.

Using the customer data collected/displayed in the Stealz Dashboard, the owner sent a targeted email campaign to a large group of customers who had visited his store in the last month. The campaign advertised a “Buy One McFlurry, Get One Free” promotion, valid only on February 14th. Each user that visited the store that day was welcomed with a customized, beacon-powered message upon their arrival:

With the help of Stealz, the owner targeted over 2,500 existing customers with his initial email campaign. The campaign received a 21% open-rate. Of the customers that opened the email, 27% visited the store that day to redeem their special reward.

This is just one way that business owners can use customizable beacon notifications to personalize a customer’s visit and encourage behavioral buying habits through Stealz.

Coming soon to Stealz

The Stealz Team is currently working on furthering our beacon tech’s capacity so that we can track a customer’s dwell time & movement within a venue. This will allow us to provide even more valuable, detailed insights into buyer behavior for our client businesses.

About Stealz

Stealz is an innovative digital platform that focuses on driving valuable customer-to-customer (C2C) marketing & facilitating effective business-to-customer (B2C) engagement for our client businesses.

Our front-facing mobile app allows businesses to reward guests for completing a variety of inherently social activities during their visit – namely, checking-in at the venue, sharing photos of their experience on social media, following the business on Twitter and leaving feedback about their visit. Guests receive Stealz points for each action they complete, and can then cash those points in for exclusive rewards.

A robust dashboard provides client businesses with detailed app usage analytics, complete guest profiles, a platform to directly respond to guest feedback, and the ability to engineer customized push & email campaigns. This allows businesses to better understand their customers, effectively enhancing both customer satisfaction & loyalty.

Jody Cumberpatch, Director of Marketing & Content at Stealz.

It’s always been our vision at Estimote to create the operating system for the real world. One of the unique characteristics we’d like to bring from the online world is the ability to measure users’ engagement and use this data to deliver more value. For the most part however, this was not possible. Until now.

Today we’re happy to announce a new release of Estimote Analytics API, rebuilt from the ground up based on feedback from some of the largest beacon deployments.

Welcome to the world of data

The Analytics Dashboard and API bring a number of metrics from e-commerce to the physical world. These include visits, visitors, visit duration, and loyalty: all readily recognizable to anyone who dabbled in online marketing.

With Estimote Analytics you will be able to tell how many people visit your venue, how often they visit, and how long they stay. But that’s not all! New Analytics support beacon tags. With tag-level segmentation you can define and track areas as granular as you’d like, e.g. aisles in a retail store or rooms in a museum.

You can visualize the data in the Analytics dashboard in Estimote Cloud, but the true power comes from combining all your data streams. That’s why we’re making a RESTful API available to you to incorporate the analytics data into whatever system or dashboard you might be using. Head to our Analytics API Documentation to learn about integrating it with your backend.

The beta version of updated Analytics has already been in use by some of our largest retail customers for the last couple of months. It has already let them collect engagement data for hundreds of thousands of visits and millions of beacon interactions. Combining the beacon analytics with proprietary data enabled unique KPIs such as store heatmaps or in-store conversion rates to emerge.

Gathering data in Estimote Analytics is supported by both the iOS and Android SDKs! The installation procedure is described in detail on our Developer Portal and entails configuring your beacons with a custom UUID, assigning geo-location and tag data to beacons, and implementing an SDK snippet in your app.

We first released Estimote Analytics almost two years ago and kept working on them since then. Today’s update marks the biggest change since the launch and we couldn’t be more excited about it. We’ve already seen a glimpse of how much value physical world analytics unlock and now we want to see where you take it from here. As always, we’re eager to hear you feedback and opinions so let us know what you think on Twitter or drop us an email at contact@estimote.com.

Bartek Bałaziński, Product Manager at Estimote

When Apple released iBeacon in 2013 it initiated a two year head start over Google in the world of contextual computing. However, Google’s announcements at its I/O event yesterday signaled that they have not only caught up with their rival but are forging ahead as the new trailblazers. We’re on scene in Mountain View this week, and one thing is abundantly clear: Google is hell-bent on promoting frictionless microlocation and contextual services. And they understand beacons have a major role to play.

And this, dear developers, is something we’ve all been waiting for. Android N is going to be world’s most contextual platform and here is why.

Brief history of Google’s beacon universe

When Google first announced its Eddystone and Physical Web beacon protocols in July 2015, iBeacon was already well-known and battle-tested. Retailers, airports, and museums have proven it can deliver business results. Developers have shown it can enable much improved user experience. But there was still an obstacle to go through. Friction.

Contextual apps are wonderful but not without issues. First, you need to actually know there is an app relevant to your location: not easy with the current state of app discovery. Then you need to install the app: go to the app store, type in your password, and wait for the download. We’ve argued on our blog that Apple’s Suggested Apps integration with iBeacon will reduce that friction, but they haven’t pushed it forward since then. That’s where Google saw an opportunity.

Google’s Eddystone and Physical Web made it possible for beacons to broadcast URL addresses. Soon after came Chrome browser integration. It enabled lightweight contextual interactions without all the friction associated with installing an app for more than 1 billion users worldwide. And the recently launched Ephemeral IDs make Eddystone more secure.

The real power of Eddystone, however, lies not in the Bluetooth protocol itself but in how it’s integrated into Google services and apps. And the integrations in Android N are magnificent.

Instant Apps, Google Play, and Nearby Notifications

Instant Apps have already been hailed as the most fascinating feature of Android N announced at Google I/O 2016. It allows developers to repackage their apps into modules directly accessible from Google Play via a deep link URL, without the need to install the app. According to first reports, it works much faster than launching web apps in a browser. Instant Apps bring together the accessibility of web links and user experience of native apps.

You can already see how it ties into Physical Web and enabling frictionless contextual interactions. One of examples Google is giving is a parking meter. Something so mundane you don’t want a native app cluttering your phone, so a beacon broadcasting an address of an Android Pay module within the app is a perfect solution. Instant Apps make it possible.

Nearby Notifications are another addition to the Physical Web stack. If the user opts in for receiving location-based notifications in Android N, they will receive secure (HTTPS) links broadcast by beacons as low-priority notifications. They’ll see them in the notification centre, but without the buzzing and sounds. The notifications can enable opening websites or installing apps from Google Play Store: another Google service with 1B+ users. They can also trigger app intent: an action within an app. If the app is not installed, developers can define a fallback URL for the intent. That’s an address to which the user will be redirected. Combined with Instant Apps this will make the flow of contextual interactions in Android N simpler than ever. Enter a location, opt in, enjoy the experience.

Apple iBeacon is still the most popular technology for creating magical experiences bridging online and offline. With Eddystone and Physical Web from Google we will see another wave of experimentation and new contextual services offered to Android users. At Estimote we believe beacon technology should be software-defined and support all the emerging protocols and standards.

That’s why our recently announced next-generation Location Beacons can broadcast iBeacon and Eddystone/Physical Web packets simultaneously. Learn more about them on our blog and order a devkit at estimote.com.

Wojtek Borowicz, Community Evangelist at Estimote

Peculiar times we live in. We’re happy to share our lives through social networks, letting Facebooks and Twitters of the world gather our personal information and yet we’ve become extremely vocal about protecting privacy and wary of allowing apps too much access. Location data is something people are particularly cautious about, so how do you, as a developer, put their minds at ease?

We’ve looked at a couple of successful examples of asking for Location Services permissions.

With great data, comes great responsibility

Fine-grained location data is a superpower. If anyone still doubts that, just read the Foursquare analysis of Chipotle foot traffic. They predicted a 30% YoY drop in revenue for Chipotle’s first quarter. The actual result? Sales plummeted 29.7%. Wealth of location data and traffic patterns let an app for discovering places predict performance of another business.

But location is not only powerful because of data. Location is also a crucial part of understanding user’s context and delivering a better experience. Examples like Google Maps and Uber are obvious, but there’s much more to location-based services than that, ranging from aforementioned Foursquare and Facebook’s Place Tips to a neat Slack extension called note.cntxt. And beacons make location even more potent. Foursquare’s data is based mostly on GPS. With beacons, you can take a much deeper look into traffic patterns. Estimote partners use our new Analytics API to gather information about what happens in store sections or even individual aisles. This is a superpower squared: like Wolverine bit by a radioactive spider.

The problem with superpowers is that it’s not only heroes who use them. As any fan of Jessica Jones will tell you, it’s villains that get the coolest powers. And consumers don’t want to bestow superpowers upon villains. Especially the annoying, digital ones like spammers or bad marketers who think the most effective way to drive conversions is shower people with notifications nevermind the context. And so we are reluctant to grant apps permission to use Location Services. If someone can predict company’s revenue from aggregated traffic information, what could they learn about your life?

Becoming a superhero

Both iOS and Android apps require users to opt in for location-based services. So you need to make sure users trust that you’re a a good guy and your app will provide them with something valuable. Here’s the trick, though: you only have one shot at this. If a user opens your app and dismisses the Location Services permission, you’re unlikely to ever get them back. And you only have a couple of seconds of their attention, so use it wisely. Cluster’s Brenden Mulligan summed it up well:

In other words, if the user denies access, the app won’t work properly — and it’s nearly impossible to explain how to fix it. This means developers need to do everything they can to get users to tap “Allow”.

Notify Nearby, a retail app that’s using beacons to deliver offers with 67% engagement rate, has a good approach. They need three types of permissions: notifications, locations, and Bluetooth. That’s a lot and they’re upfront about this.

The app automatically detects what is disabled and allows you to enable it from the same screen without overwhelming you with information:

Stealz is an app for discovering local deals that works with almost 1,000 businesses, including the likes of McDonald’s and Taco Bell. When the app is running, it uses GPS data to show offers nearby. If it’s the background, it passively scans for beacons to alert users of available deals. The app explains this in two steps. First it encourages users to enable Location Services and discover offers in vicinity.

Then it explains the difference between GPS and iBeacon scanning. It’s clever: many consumers are still unaware of beacons, so the pop-up also serves educational purpose.

It is usually a good idea to display a customized notification to make it more polished. But sometimes you’re just as good with a default OS-level template. This is how Close.by, an app that introduced the idea of Merchant Pairings to local businesses in New Jersey, does it. No bells and whistles, just short value proposition laid down in front of the user:

The above are examples related to commerce and marketing. But location data can be useful in a host of other contexts. Robin helps companies manage conference rooms and track presence across the office. The app lets you quickly check where are your colleagues and enables them to find you. But it would be creepy if it didn’t allow you to go offline anytime you wanted. Robin does a good job of addressing that. They use a single screen to not only ask for Location Services permission but also educate users how to take care of privacy.

Be cool, but also be warm

That subheading is one of the loading messages displayed by Slack and it perfectly sums up how you should design your location permission request. Don’t hesitate to create a custom, polished pop-up explaining why you need to use Location Services. But above all, remember that people value their privacy and understand that location data is a superpower they’d rather not bestow upon a villain. So empathize with them. Be crystal clear and concise. Make it easy for them not only to grant you permission, but also to understand why they’re doing that.

And remember: with great power comes great responsibility!

Wojtek Borowicz, Community Evangelist at Estimote

Our neighborhood, the beautiful city of Kraków, is also home to one of the world’s largest and most modern entertainment venues: TAURON Arena Kraków. The Arena has hosted Elton John, Katy Perry, and this weekend it will host Estimote’s RealityHack hackathon. We give you the beacons and the arena, you build apps to enhance the experience. Deal?

Sign up at realityhackkrk.com and meet us on Saturday, June 11th, at TAURON Arena Kraków.

Let me entertain you

Beacons are hitting it big in sports and entertainment. FC Barcelona and Pittsburgh Penguins reach millions of fans with location-based content. NFL and NBA teams are on board as well. And no wonder: delivering perfectly-placed, perfectly-timed information is the icing on the cake that ensures fans and visitors have a blast. Here’s an opportunity for you to decide how this icing will look. Is it going to be indoor navigation, seat upgrades, food and drinks delivery? You show us!

During the hackathon, you’ll be able to build apps in six categories to upgrade the visitor’s experience:

• Indoor navigation
• Show experience
• Food & beverage
• Merchandise
• Prizes and awards
• VIP experience

We’re kicking off at 9 AM sharp and we move straight on to hacking. You have until 5 PM to put together something that will stun the jury from Estimote and Tauron with your idea and execution. We’ll have mentors on the ground to help you with your brilliant hacks. We’re bringing our own crew from Estimote alongside experts from PLEO skills, Untitled Kingdom, and more.

The whole Arena has already been set up with more than 100 Estimote Beacons: at the stands, around the lobby, and in the VIP skybox. You can use this infrastructure to create your app and if you need more beacons for testing or placing somewhere we didn’t think of, we got your back! Every team will have additional beacons at their disposal.

The best team gets to take home beacons and stickers from Estimote as well as our brand new, limited Physical Web t-shirts that broadcast URL addresses. And the best thing? Arena managers will be closely watching the projects to explore possible contextual services based on beacons and microlocation. Who knows, maybe it’s your idea that will get deployed at one of world’s largest and most modern entertainment venues!

If you haven’t registered yet, now’s the last chance! We have limited capacity and the last spots are still free for the taking. Grab them now and we’ll see you on Saturday. RSVP here.

Oh, and one more thing. Make sure to drop by at the before party at Estimote Kraków HQ at Krakusa 11, Friday evening. We’ll be serving drinks and snacks and answering all the questions you might have about RealityHack @ TAURON Arena. Fun times ahead!

Wojtek Borowicz, Community Evangelist at Estimote

Have you ever thought about powering your beacons externally? Connecting them with another smart device? Wanted to customize Bluetooth data packets? You can do all of that now!

We’ve already covered several major novelties and opportunities opened with Estimote Location Beacons and our brand new SDK 4.0. Today we are talking about the GPIO port. GPIO (General Purpose Input/Output) enables you to wirelessly manage external devices and receiving data. You can turn your beacon into a controller or receiver by connecting it to any electronic device. The options are numerous: diodes, displays, sensors… actually, any electronic modules.

It’s all about state

There are two modes for GPIO connection: Input and Output. They operate based on High/Low logic. Basically, beacon broadcasts or receives the state of the device in zero/one format.

With Input mode, beacon becomes a receiver, picking up data from the device and transmitting it through Estimote Telemetry packet. This way you know what’s up with the device: is it on or off, for instance.. We’ve played around with some basic examples ourselves and encourage you to try it out too! You’ll find a tutorial right here.

In Output mode, you turn you beacon into a controller and can use it to manage the connected device with an app.As soon as you are in range, app will send data to a beacon, activating the connected device. It happens just by changing the state of GPIO output pin to high.

Is that it?

There’s more to GPIO! EstiUART, our brand new protocol, allows you to define what a beacon is advertising. If you configure GPIO as an EstiUART interface, you’ll be able to use another device to enable custom advertising packets for an Estimote Beacon. We’ve developed commands that enable you to propagate data or apply changes to a beacon. Depending on the command you can change Advertising Interval, enable Generic Advertisers, and set what beacon broadcasts. Just connect a beacon to computer and define what’s it going to broadcast.

Making it live

Our friends from tretton37 based in Sweden, are already using GPIO and it’s coming along more than fine. They were looking for an opportunity to customize data beacons broadcast and Location Beacons were a perfect fit.

The team is working on a public transport project, aiming to add context to every bus ride. Checking passengers in and out of vehicles and providing them with context is what it’s all about.

Now the prototype is live and Karl-Henrik Nillson and Michał Łusiak, software developers leading the project, shared some details with us:

“We run Raspberry Pi with WIFI hotspot and Node.js server. You can connect to it, and set up test scenarios in web UI. That’s how we decide what data and when beacons will broadcast. To make communication between Raspberry PI and Location Beacon easier, we also wrote small Node.js module, that we’re planning to open source in near future.”

EstiUART is brand new and were in touch with Michał and Karl-Henrik to help them kick off the project.

“Our idea was to build prototype based on Raspberry Pi, and Location Beacon connected through UART. Estimote was very supportive making sure we have all the documentation needed.”

If you also have an idea for GPIO port or UART, feel free to reach out. Actually if you have any beacon project idea, we’d be happy to hear from you! Drop us a line to contact@estimote.com or Twitter.

Liliya Matsuk, Community Manager at Estimote

This is a guest post by Giancarlo De Lio, Chief Visionary Officer at iUGO Health

It seems like everything around us has been disrupted to no end: the way you eat or take a taxi, short and long-term housing, even pets and babies have their own gadgets, apps, and as we’ve recently seen, robot companions. The one industry that’s been lagging behind, to no one’s surprise, is healthcare. Due to complicated process, ancient legacy systems, and lots of red tape, technological innovation has been slow in the past years, but that will soon change as beacons, smart devices, and connected objects become more popular in the way patient care is received and administered. As the paradigm shifts to provide hospital quality care in the home, the industry has to evolve with patient expectations and other technological advancements that impact the quality of care.

When it comes to receiving care in the home following a surgery, ER admission, or treatment patients and their family members face a lot of challenges. From monitoring their loved one’s progress, vitals and stats, as well as managing medications, treatments, and follow up visits, family members become overwhelmed very quickly by all there is to do. Add in different family members and caregivers that are also involved in managing the patient’s health at different points in time and you quickly have a process with broken communication and missing information, putting the patient directly in danger of getting seriously injured or worse.

The solution is to streamline everything into one process and product that patients, family members, caregivers, and everyone else around the table can use, to help that patient get well, make better health decisions, and receive the support they need to stay healthy. Beacons are a fantastic low cost solution for monitoring health in the home, thus helping the patient, especially seniors, do things like remember to take medications, eat regularly and stay hydrated, find their belongings around the house, and prevent potentially fatal serious falls. At current, only a handful of companies have been brave enough to take the plunge to incorporate beacons and internet of things into their offerings, but that number will grow exponentially as more smart devices and objects are introduced in the marketplace.

The demand for solutions in personal health and home care will also grow due to the fact that patients are asked, by their providers, to be more involved in self monitoring and reporting. From keeping track of weight and blood pressure, to monitoring sugar levels and nutrition, patients and their families are directly involved in the health outcomes of that patient. Self monitoring and reporting are great ways for the patient to engage with their health and everyone involved in managing it, however, due to a lack of adequate tools and access, some patients end up slipping through the cracks. Integrating beacons with home health monitoring solutions, significantly increases the likelihood of continued engagement by the patient due to the personalized content and the right notifications and reminders, just at the right time.

About iUGO Health

iUGO Health is a home care platform that connects institutions, home care agencies, families and caregivers in one place, with the patient as the focal point. The platform permits configuration with beacons, smart devices, and other connected objects, turning any room in the house into a smart room that helps the patient adhere to their care programs. Patients also use iUGO Health to monitor their conditions at home, communicate with the care team and family, and create self progress reports. Estimote beacons and stickers enable patients to receive contextual and proximity based reminders right to their phones, tablets, and watches.

iUGO Health uses beacons to create contextual reminders by tagging equipment to work with the patient's’ life rather than take them out of it. Placing a beacon on the weigh scale allows for the patient to get a reminder to weigh themselves when next to the beacon rather than when they are away from the scale in the living room. The beacons can be used to find equipment that has been misplaced through the way finding capability. The beacons can set off an alarm when sensing the patient is leaving the house but forgetting their cane. The opportunities to work with a person’s life rather than against it will lead to better health outcomes and better satisfaction with the system.

Giancarlo De Lio, Chief Visionary Officer at iUGO Health

Mere months after introducing Location Beacons, we’re now updating our Proximity Beacons with new hardware and firmware, as well! We added programmable NFC, made it 30% more energy efficient (which allows improved responsiveness without compromising battery life), and it’s the first beacon on the market sporting Nordic Semiconductor’s latest nRF52 chip, the most advanced BLE chip yet. All that value for the same $59 per dev kit of three Proximity Beacons, further reinforcing their position as the most cost-efficient beacons available.

Pre-order new Proximity Beacons
Shipping starts later this July

Far, Near, Immediate … NFC!

We’ve been hearing a lot of great ideas for projects that require explicit interactions with beacons—confirming payments, collecting loyalty points, clocking-in, etc. The new Proximity Beacon comes with a built-in NFC tag, making these ideas much easier to implement.

Think about it this way: we want Estimote to be the bridge between your app and the physical world, and now, these interactions can be based not only on proximity, but also on the very explicit gesture of touching a beacon. It’s almost as if we’ve added a new API method to the physical world!

NFC in the new Proximity Beacons is fully programmable: set up as many of your own NDEF records as you like, up to 256 bytes total, all through our secure configuration API. Together with the Estimote fleet management API, you could even re-configure these records remotely.

Last but not least, thanks to Android’s built-in NFC support, the new beacons open up another channel for app distribution. Just program the NFC with your Android app’s unique identifier, and then touching a smartphone to that beacon will open your app’s page in Google Play Store. Or, with Instant Apps coming to the next version of Android, it could run your app without installation!

Tap to connect

Estimote Android app already supports Proximity Beacon’s NFC. It’s now easier to identify and configure beacons—just tap one with your smartphone, and the Estimote app will automatically open and connect to it.

Better responsiveness

Developers building beacon-enabled apps are often balancing between responsiveness and battery life. With the new Proximity Beacons, there’s no need to compromise. We’ve tripled their default responsiveness, and the default battery life is still more than 2 years. If you want to prioritize your beacons’ lifetime instead, the new beacons can last as long as 7 years (and that’s before Power Modes kick in, further extending the battery life).

4th generation firmware

We introduced the 4th generation of our firmware a few months ago alongside Location Beacons, and we’re making it available in the new Proximity Beacons, too. Just to recall: the new firmware brings optimized power consumption, faster and more secure configuration and firmware update process, connectionless sensor and battery data via the Estimote Telemetry packet, and a dedicated Estimote Connectivity packet to keep advertising iBeacon and Eddystone even when connected to a beacon.

More opportunities, same price

The refreshed Proximity Beacons will cost the same at $59 for a 3-beacon dev kit, and with all the new features, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more budget-friendly option on the market. Pre-order them today, and be among the first to receive them when we start shipping in two weeks.

Pre-order new Proximity Beacons
Shipping starts later this July

CIOs, CTOs, and all flavors of decision makers dread hardware updates. And for good reason. Imagine you set up a new Wi-Fi infrastructure in your office. A few weeks later, a Wi-Fi standard changes. It requires new hardware and you need to replace the whole infrastructure. That’s a disaster.

It’s not the case with Estimote Beacons. In the recent months we’ve launched Location Beacons (the robust ones) and refreshed Proximity Beacons (the get-started-quickly ones). And now we’re following up with Estimote Deployment app that makes upgrading your beacon infrastructure as easy as putting the new beacons on walls and tapping a single button. If only Wi-Fi routers worked like that…

Updgrade your beacons faster than you can say ‘beacon infrastructure’

The beacon ecosystem is still at the stage where the only constant is change. Only in the past 12 months we have seen next generation of fast, more capable BLE chips, Google has made a major push into proximity, and Bluetooth SIG annouced Bluetooth 5.0 that will also require new hardware. And we at Estimote have released beacons with new firmware architecture.

But what does it mean for our users? You don’t want to deploy and configure your beacons from scratch. You don’t want to have to modify the app. But even more so, you don’t want to be left behind, when beacons evolve.

No worries. You can easily update to next generation beacons for more reliability, superior battery life, and improved fleet management. Just stick the new beacon next to the old one. All you need is the Estimote Deployment app to automatically migrate all the settings and IDs. Thanks to our patent-pending seamless migration technology there’s no need for any changes to your app, no manual configuration, and what is most important - nothing your users will notice! It just works and takes no more than 30 seconds per beacon. In most cases, you can upgrade your whole beacon infrastructure in one location within 25 minutes.

When you migrate your infrastructure with Estimote Deployment app, we’ll automatically reset the removed beacons to factory settings so you can use them for another project. We’ll also check the batteries and notify you if your beacons are running out of juice. Dispose of them responsibly! If you don’t know how, shoot us an email at recycle@estimote.com and we will take it on from there.

This is an early release of Estimote Deployment, but we’ll keep expanding it over time. Don’t hesitate to let us know how you like it and what other features would help you with installing beacons in your venues. You can reach us on Twitter and via email.

The Deployment app is available in the App Store.You can order Location Beacons on our website.

Marcin Mycek, Product Manager at Estimote

Wojtek Borowicz, Community Evangelist at Estimote

Context is key to building an amazing user experience for the physical world. Two years ago, we introduced Estimote Stickers to enrich location context with information about nearby objects. A small beacon device, easily attached to any everyday item, turns it into a smart object.

That’s how the Nearables concept was born. It resonated strongly: we see a lot of amazing projects utilizing Estimote Stickers to build an engaging user experience. Many fantastic teams are using stickers in their projects.

Varier designs and manufactures chairs that move with your body. Through the unique combination of progressive design and ergonomics, Varier chairs give freedom of movement to the body – just like nature intended.

Hellicar & Lewis Sound Clips is a collection of sensors that can detect movement, together with an iPad application designed to augment storytelling with fantastic sound effects.

For the past two years we’ve listened to them (and many others!) closely, and we heard what the developer community expects from stickers. Physical Web support, better iBeacon integration, and fleet management features. Inspired by your feedback, we’re bringing all of this to Estimote Stickers.

Packet configuration support

Until now stickers only supported a custom Nearable packet. We designed it as the most efficient way to report the presence and conditions of an object. Combined with extended Estimote Cloud information, it provides enriched context with data about an object. Many people love sensor data in the Nearable packet, but we also understand that not all projects require such a rich set of information. That’s why we’ve decided to introduce full support for two additional protocols, iBeacon and Eddystone-URL.

The Physical Web

This year Google made a big bet on beacons. The Nearby API and Physical Web were integrated with both Android and iOS.

We love the innovation Google introduced, so we decided to add Eddystone support to all our products. We started with beacons and now we’re bringing it to stickers as well. You can configure and broadcast custom URL addresses thanks to Eddystone-URL and Physical Web. These packets can be picked up by mobile devices and used to engage users even without companion apps installed.

We’ve already put the new Physical Web capabilities of Estimote Stickers to the test. A few weeks back we manufactured a limited run of branded t-shirts to hand out at Google I/O. All shirts had stickers sewn in and set to broadcast URL addresses. A simple companion app enabled users to edit the link they wanted to broadcast. As you may have seen on Twitter, the Physical Web shirts were a hit:

Physical Web shirts

iBeacon packet

iBeacon was a catalyst for the context revolution on mobile platforms and it became the standard for delivering contextual information. It’s a core part of many existing beacon deployments. From now on, Estimote Stickers fully support customizable iBeacon data. You can define your own Proximity UUID, Major, and Minor values on stickers.

Motion Only Advertising

iBeacon and Eddystone-URL are limited to broadcasting only the presence of a beacon. We decided to extend this with Motion Only conditional broadcasting mode. When enabled, it allows stickers to broadcast only when in motion. This allows you to take action only when a user is directly engaged with an object.

Stickers Fleet Management

We also wanted to make configuring stickers easier, as more and more companies deploy them at scale. That’s where Fleet Management kicks in. You can now easily configure settings of your devices using the Estimote Cloud dashboard and apply them by connecting via Bluetooth, just like with original Estimote Beacons.

We also actively monitor data about your fleet. Health information of your entire network, like missing devices or battery status, is always accessible. No code changes are required either. Just update the Estimote SDK in your application and that’s it! Everything you need to know about your setup is in the Estimote Cloud Dashboard.

Our complete Fleet management solution is now available on Android, too! You can easily connect, synchronize, and adjust settings directly from the Android SDK, with the app soon to follow.

Just a click away

To get all these amazing features, the only requirement is a simple firmware update. All stickers on the market are fully compatible. Our new features are supported from version 4.6.0 of iOS SDK and 0.10.6 of Android SDK.

Marcin Klimek, Product Manager at Estimote

Wojtek Borowicz, Community Evangelist at Estimote

This is a guest post by Tomasz Rupik, Co-Founder of Bleesk

At Bleesk we work with various companies that take advantage of proximity marketing, whether they are large shopping malls, retail chains, or digital agencies. We spend hours talking to them and there is always one recurring question: how can I create a campaign that will engage my customers and convert? Like with any other type of marketing, there is no single answer, but rather a combination of techniques that together create a synergy effect and produce a successful campaign.

1. Data is key

Marketing is all about making a personal connection with your customers. Your goal is to deliver the right message, to the right person, at the right time.

The key to a personalized proximity campaign that impacts your customer’s behavior is data about the people you want to reach. Before releasing a campaign consider who are the people that will most likely enjoy your message. How old are they? Are they women or men? What are their interests? Once you study your customers, it will be far easier to plan and create an engaging campaign.

Make sure you don’t err on this one. Imagine a woman in her 40s walking through a large shopping mall and being bombarded with campaigns about video games for kids. The result is easy to predict, she won’t like it.

That is where your proximity solution provider should come to help. At Bleesk we enable your customers to voluntarily share data about their age, gender, or even information like their name or interests. Most of them are keen to share some personal data because they want a more valuable and better targeted offers with personal approach.

2. Make it personal

One of the most important things you should consider is to include a personal greeting. “Sarah, great to see you again! Check out new shoe collection” will make Sarah instantly interested. Personal notifications significantly increase the open rate of notifications and lead to more sales.

We also enable customers to set their preferences regarding the type of campaigns they would like to be notified about. They can choose one or many categories: Food & Drink, Shopping & Services, Sports & Entertainment, Health & Beauty, Events & Information, and Real Estate. Thanks to this information, every marketer immediately knows what are the most interesting things to their customers and can adjust the campaign to their needs. Customers, on the other hand, receive only offers that match their interests.

3. Go viral

Delivering a proximity-based message is a great opening but the campaign doesn’t have to end the moment your customer exits your shop. Making the campaign viral and reaching more people is a natural next step to think about. Social media is a powerful equalizer because any company can get recognized regardless of their brand awareness or marketing budget. This is the goal for every marketer. Bleesk social sharing feature enables you and your customers to share every campaign through Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or any other social network available on their mobile phone.

4. Reward loyal customers

Returning customers spend 67% more than new ones and rewarding their loyalty goes a long way to retain them. When choosing your proximity platform provider make sure that Loyalty Campaigns are included as one of the features. Bleesk provides three types of loyalty campaigns: you can reward your customers with coupons for making a purchase, visiting a store, or collecting a certain amount of points.

5. If you want to engage people, pay attention to details

The most engaging campaigns deliver great experience by providing contextual information, entertainment or incentives to customers that are at a certain location or close to an object. Each campaign can be different so it is essential to customize its look and feel to fit into the overall marketing strategy. Using high resolution images and graphics or even adding a video or music often makes sense to capture customer’s attention. Also, campaigns that have at least one call to action button help significantly increase attention span and convert.

6. Engaging =/= Overwhelming

Too often the first question a marketer asks is How do I send a push notification to every customer? If your campaign strategy is only based on push notifications, it will fail as nobody wants to be interrupted too often. People will turn off or even uninstall the app. Avoid using too many notifications. One is usually enough if it delivers real value to customers. Once they experience the benefits, they don’t need notifications. Beacons are designed for context and this is what you should focus on. Don’t overwhelm your customers with notifications.

Tomasz Rupik, Co-Founder of Bleesk

About Bleesk

Bleesk is a leading proximity platform provider that helps marketers and brands use the power of beacons and contextual campaigns. Bleesk consists of a mobile app for iOS and Android, a CMS that allows to create, manage, and analyze proximity campaigns, and collect data about customers’ behavior, SDK and API. For more information, visit Bleesk’s website, blog or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news.

Ever since iBeacon launched, the gap between the online and the offline world has been closing. The release of Physical Web eliminated the need for a dedicated, app and lowered the barrier of entering the world of microlocation context even further. Today, Estimote is taking the next step in the contextual computing evolution by launching physical world-to-phone messaging technology that allows to you send hyper-contextual messages.

With Here & Now, you can craft messages and links that will be delivered to people in physical locations via a network of Physical Web beacons, based on exact location and timing. No longer is there a need for a dedicated app or programming skills. You control the whole experience from a web panel or through an API! The messages are unobtrusively shown on the notification panel and lets users instantly evaluate their relevance, and receive more information on a linked website.

We are now looking for beta testers for this technology, if you think you are a good match, let us know at business@estimote.com

Here & Now also lets you understand how people engage with the messages you deliver. Foot traffic estimates, message impression counts, click-thru rates, and A/B testing are all at your disposal and allow for crafting more engaging messages.

Use Cases

Estimote mission is to make contextual computing ubiquitous, so Here & Now and the Physical Web are natural components of this mission. Here & Now is particularly well suited to contextually messaging people around when the message can and will often change and when engagement data can help deliver better service. It works best in cases where delivering the information easily is more important than tightly controlling the user experience.

For example, your favorite restaurant can now message you Today’s Special when you’re around, and Here & Now takes the hassle out of crafting the message. You don’t need to have an app installed, so all the friction related to finding a dedicated app and waiting for it to download is removed. Or, you walk into a theater and immediately learn what movie is showing next. On top of that, you can check the latest trailer with a touch of a button. And while riding a bus, you may get information about the next stop and what’s around.

Distribution

Here & Now is built on top of Physical Web, the open standard backed by Google, which is built into Android and supported in Chrome for iOS. It’s expected to be integrated into other mobile web browsers soon. With 2 billion smartphones out there, it is a standard with unprecedented distribution potential.

With such great power comes great responsibility, especially with regard to user privacy. We’ve got you fully covered, as user opt-in is required and no personal information is ever sent to Estimote or third parties.

I’m interested!

Here & Now is currently in private beta, if you are interested in deploying this technology feel free to contact us at business@estimote.com

Bartek Bałaziński, Product Manager at Estimote

There’s a ton of beacon use cases, each of them unique in needs, goals, and audience. Talking to a vast community of developers helped us crystalize these needs. To tailor our stack towards them, earlier this year we split our beacon product line into two: Proximity and Location Beacons. The split was essential to mark two different strategies towards microlocation: proximity and location. Read on to learn what we mean by that, what the pros and cons of each approach are, and which one will suit your project better!

Proximity: context is near

Proximity includes all the use cases where context is provided within certain areas. Let’s say a user enters a shop and receives a “Welcome” notification, or a coupon for a new flavor pops up when you walk by your favorite ice cream shop. This most popular approach involves “tagging” certain areas (a hotel lobby, a restaurant table, an airport gate, etc.) with a “marker”—a beacon—recognizable by smartphones. You can tune beacon’s broadcasting power to adjust the range of this marker. Each beacon has a unique identifier (iBeacon UUID/Major/Minor, Eddystone UID, etc.). Your app can simply detect it in the proximity, read its identifier to figure out which marker it is, and act accordingly.

The upside? Simplicity—just place a bunch of beacons around, add detection code to your app, and voila: outstanding user experience begins! For the vast majority of use cases, you don’t really need super accurate indoor navigation to deliver location-based context. Want to know which table the customer is sitting at? Just place a beacon on it, and don’t worry about floor plans, tables changing their placement, etc. Easy as that! That’s how Downtown app, among many others, enables their amazing dining experience.

And with Physical Web introduced recently, you don’t even need an app anymore—just “mark” an area with a beacon broadcasting Eddystone-URL and take users to a website for more information about the place.

Proximity approaches can even be used to provide very basic indoor positioning. Since you know which markers are nearby, you can plot the user’s rough position on a map, and provide basic instructions (“go to the second floor”) to guide them around.

All of that is why it’s the most popular approach on the market right now, winning the hearts of thousands of users all over the world. Our Proximity Beacons have always been optimized exactly for this purpose. They are cost-efficient, support all the necessary formats (iBeacon, Eddystone-UID, Eddystone-URL), and they feature configurable range and identifiers to customize your “markers.” Pair all this with our Estimote SDK, enabling you to detect users entering and exiting the marked areas, and you’ve got yourself a smart, proximity-aware app.

Location: get granular

Sometimes, you need more precision. Museums with many exhibits in a single hall. A parking lot with hundreds of spots. A huge shopping mall full of nooks and crannies that makes you feel lost in a jungle of stores. That’s why two years ago we embarked on our journey to build Indoor Location, enabling more complex and robust mircolocation projects. With this approach, we take a floor plan, distribute beacons evenly inside, and our secret-sauce algorithms carefully analyze the data from the beacons to give you an exact (x,y) position inside that space. This is a huge step up over the “you are somewhere near” approach. Once your app knows the (x,y), it can look up the three nearest museum exhibits, mark the exact position of your car in a parking lot, or guide you to a shop you need through the maze of turns and corridors.

Alan Kay famously said: “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” We are really serious about Indoor Location. Introducing Location Beacons was a major move forward. Longer battery life allows you to work on more aggressive advertising settings necessary for accurate Indoor Location. Additional fleet management and security options make deploying and maintaining the required amount of beacons a breeze. They also support our own Estimote Location data packet that provides Indoor algorithms with more data, and also enables Indoor Location to work in the background on iOS. Location Beacons are simply tailored for Indoor Location, becoming the first version of hardware dedicated to the location approach. Together with Estimote Indoor Location SDK, they turn a smartphone into a sophisticated compass to position and navigate in any venue.

(Admittedly, Location Beacons with their superior battery life, more power saving options, extra security features like support for Eddystone-EID, extra sensors, GPIO—are also a great choice for the proximity approach, so they are worth extra consideration, even if you don’t go for the Indoor Location capabilities.)

Pick and get started in 30 minutes

So now you know! Choose the proximity approach with Proximity Beacons and Estimote SDK to easily add physical world context to your apps with digital markers—a dev kit with 3 Proximity Beacons is just $59, and bulk pricing starts at $19 per beacon. Adding simple beacon detection code to your app with Estimote SDK will take you 30 minutes with our tutorial.

Need something more? Looking for most robust and granular location context to build into your app? The location approach, Location Beacons, and Estimote Indoor SDK for iOS have you covered—you’ll need one or more beacons per wall, so get two or three dev kits of Location Beacons ($99 for a kit). Our Indoor Location app for iOS will help you map your space out in just a few minutes, and then our tutorial will help you integrate Indoor into your own app. You’ll be getting the (x,y) in the same 30 minutes!

If you have any thoughts/ideas to share or questions to ask, drop us a line at contact@estimote.com or ping us on Twitter. We’re always here to help!

Liliya Matsuk, Community Manager at Estimote

Piotr Krawiec, Product Manager at Estimote

We love stories. People have stories, places have stories, even something as arcane to an average person as agile software development relies on so called user stories. That’s because stories are how we relate: to people, to places, even software products.

Hellicar&Lewis, a London-based design studio, wanted to make stories more interactive with Estimote Stickers. Their project, Sound Clips, uses technology to help children with special educational needs develop their imagination through storytelling. Below you can read how the project came to be.

Mighty Mega stories

Discover - Children’s Story Centre explores how storytelling can, in their own words, help improve reading, writing, speaking and listening skills for children in fun and imaginative ways. On weekends, they organize Mighty Mega Club: an event for children with disabilities and special educational needs. The kids participate in storytelling sessions, where adult story builders help them craft stories using abstract physical props. This year, Discover wanted to push further into interactive experiences. They hired Hellicar&Lewis to help Mighty Mega Club figure out new ways to use technology to inspire children.

The first step H&L took was to observe the sessions: The problem was that we didn’t want to design a product that took children’s attention away from the props themselves, or interrupted their creative process with lots of technology. We wanted something that was instant, rewarding and lightweight physically and conceptually. said Joel Lewis, Co-Founder and Interaction Director at Hellicar&Lewis.

They settled on sound.

Chirping nearables

H&L wanted to let children and story builders enhance their stories with sounds. A bird chirping, a door creaking, a person giggling: little touches that ignite the imagination. But how to do that in a way that doesn’t feel artificial but seems like a natural extension of storytelling?

The answer is: Estimote Stickers. H&L developed an iPad app with tens of sound effects, grouped into nine categories: Domestic, Farmyard, Jungle, Ocean, Silly, Space, Transport, Weather, and new user recordings. Every clip is tied to an Estimote Sticker hidden in a custom enclosure. Nearables activate the app when moved and iPad responds with a sound. It happens instantly so the story’s narrative is never disrupted: only enhanced by the sound effects.

Estimote Stickers allowed users to concentrate on making stories and think about the sound effects that should accompany them, rather than being distracted by unnecessary technology. Ultimately we wanted to augment existing behaviour rather than trying to change the already amazing process of Story Building. adds Lewis.

Overcoming hurdles

Development started by using a technique known as Paper Prototyping to build a prototype of the product with the team at Discover before writing any code. After establishing how and why the project would function with the client, H&L were then ready to translate their prototype into a working digital/physical product.

H&L relies on openFrameworks for software development so their developer, James Bentley wrote a wrapper around Estimote iOS SDK and used the the ESTNearableManager object for managing interactions with nearables. When they moved on to testing the first prototype, a new issue appeared - the accelerometer in Estimote Stickers was too sensitive, triggering sound clips even at the slightest movement. It caused the iPad to play multiple sounds one after another, leading to cacophony instead of immersion. So H&L kept testing and tweaking the interaction mechanism. The benchmark of success? When the banana felt right (you will need to watch the video above to understand what they mean by that).

With the software side done (it’s open source and you can access it on GitHub, H&L could start working on the physical side of Sound Clips. Estimote Stickers were too tiny for the Mighty Mega sessions. H&L also wanted something more resistant to squeezing, pushing, and all the wear and tear inevitable for toys.

They thought about 3D printing but after a while moved on to felt pouches. They’re nice to the touch, durable, and affordable: a perfect combination. Every pouch also comes with a clip so they can be attached to any prop to allow for fun combinations. For example, have you ever heard a banana sing like a bird?

We felt the pouch design worked nicely with our overall “ABC" Aesthetic. The pouches provided a nice literal touch point between the app and the sound clips as well as creating a tactile interface that felt right with the Discovery Centre’s prop based analogue story telling approach. It’s also important that the clips themselves could pretty much attach to anything the kids and storytellers might use - cloth, wooden spoons, hats, bananas, paper, dolls etc. The bulldog clips were the first things we used in testing and as the old saying goes “if it ain’t broke….” The nice thing about the bulldog clips is that they are cheap and replaceable and available on every high street - something that isn’t true for 3D printed custom parts! explained Peter Hellicar, Co-Founder and Creative Director at Hellicar&Lewis.

In conclusion

The video at the beginning of this post says more than a 1,000 words about the quality of Sound Clips. H&L did incredible work implementing nearables as a storytelling tool. When you see your product used to help children foster their imagination, you can only be proud. Thanks H&L for making us so proud!

Wojtek Borowicz, Community Evangelist at Estimote

After we introduced the next generation of Proximity Beacons, many of you asked if we were adding NFC support to Location Beacons as well. Today, we’re refreshing our flagship line of beacons with a programmable NFC tag… and so much more. We extended the range of Location Beacons to 200 meters and introduced a new API to store data in the beacon’s memory. The next addition, Sensors API, makes it easier to tap into many sensors on board Location Beacons, while the automatic firmware update goes a long way to improve fleet management.

One thing hasn’t changed: the new Location Beacons cost the same $99 for a dev kit of three!

Pre-order new Location Beacons
Shipping starts late September

200 m range

Recently announced Bluetooth 5.0 promises quadruple the range, but that’s still a long ways ahead—we need to wait for the final spec, hardware adoption, smartphone adoption, etc. With new Location Beacons, you can get the long range without the wait, and it’s fully compatible with Bluetooth 4.

We’ve added a new broadcasting power option, +10 dBm, which boosts the max range of a beacon to about 200 m. You can now use a single beacon to cover a huge lobby, or benefit from improved signal strength and stability in challenging environments—e.g., if a beacon is in a toll booth, and the user with a smartphone is inside the car, you’ll have success even with all the metal and glass barriers heavily weakening the signal. The long-range option also pairs extremely well with the Estimote Telemetry packet, allowing you to gather sensor and beacon health data (for fleet management purposes) from a distance. It’s also a great fit for the Physical Web and Estimote Here & Now, allowing you to send messages over longer distances.

Beacon Storage API

Location Beacons come with 1 Mb (i.e., 128 kB) EEPROM memory, and now you can use that memory to store your own data with our brand-new Beacon Storage API. It can be anything you want: plain text, JSON string, protobuf data, etc.

This is taking contextual data to the next-level: previously, beacons could tell apps the location of the user, but the apps still needed to fetch the relevant data from cloud backends. Now, you can put the data literally where it belongs, be it clues to your treasure hunt game, descriptions of the museum exhibit, ID of an employee that last checked on the beacon or the area, etc. Beacon Storage API can reduce your app’s reliance on stable Internet connection, drive down the latency, or even make it more secure by requiring a physical presence in order to access the data.

Sensors API

Location Beacons also come with a wide variety of sensors, and broadcast their data in real-time with Estimote Telemetry packets—all to add even more context to your apps. Today, we’re taking it to the next level by introducing Sensors API.

Our iOS and Android SDKs will now automatically relay all the Telemetry data to Estimote Cloud, where you can conveniently access it through the Beacon Dashboard:

… or consume it in your own app via our RESTful Cloud API:

$ APP_ID=my-sensors-app
$ APP_TOKEN=845b2f14a9fa54321ff8cf9b95a86054
$ BEACON_ID=046618f76a44404af14a546e7a37ac3b
$ curl -u $APP_ID:$APP_TOKEN \
https://cloud.estimote.com/v2/devices/$BEACON_ID/telemetry \
| python -m json.tool

{
    "data": [
        {
            "ambient_light_level": 3,
            "date": "2016-08-11T12:00:00.000Z",
            "temperature": 13.1593427658081
        },
        {
            "ambient_light_level": 2000,
            "date": "2016-08-11T13:00:00.000Z",
            "temperature": 23.6983528137207
        },
(…)

Tapping into all the sensor data has never been easier! (And by the way, we’ve also added a barometer to the new Location Beacons, so that you can monitor atmospheric pressure of the environment, or estimate the altitude the beacon is at.)

Automatic firmware update

Software development went from huge, big-bang, packaged releases once every few years (think, Office 97, Office 2000, etc.), to continuous deployment where software updates are being pushed to production dozens of times every day. At Estimote, we believe the Internet of Things should adopt this modern approach. Last month we made it easier to upgrade your hardware infrastructure, and with the new Location Beacons, we’re making firmware upgrades fully automatic and painless as well.

With the new automatic firmware update, every user of your app with Estimote SDK embedded in it can now not only propagate the configuration changes, but also the latest beacon firmware.

NFC: ready, tap, go!

You already know what NFC is all about. We talked about it when updating Proximity Beacons, and the same, fully programmable NFC tag is now available in Location Beacons, too. Tap on a beacon, and it can prompt an action of your choice, whether it’s checking in, or collecting a loyalty coupon. And with the Estimote Android app, you can now also connect to a Location Beacon just by touching it.

5x responsiveness, 5 years battery life

The updated Location Beacons are now equipped with the nRF52 chip from Nordic Semiconductor, on par with our just-refreshed Proximity Beacon. This time, we’ve managed to increase the default responsiveness 5 times (!), and the battery life is still 5 years.

Ton of improvements, same price

Location Beacons, the most powerful beacons on the market, have just gotten better—and with all the new APIs, it’s now easier than ever to tap into all that power. And yes, you know it, it’s still the same $99 for a dev kit with three beacons. Pre-order yours today to be among the first to try them out!

Pre-order new Location Beacons
Shipping starts late September