This is a guest post by Niko Roberts, Co-founder & CEO at Eventfuel

You might already know that global fashion brand Sephora are renowned for running some of the best customer-facing events in the world. One thing you possibly didn’t know is that they also run fabulous events for their staff. Recently, Eventfuel.io was thrilled to participate in the support of one of these events at the luscious Sofitel Sentosa Resort in Singapore.

One of the reasons Sephora chose to work with us was the unique experiences that we bring to the table using “cool tech”. We’ve always loved working with the latest technologies to push events further for our customers. By forging great partnerships with other tech innovators from across the globe, we continue to stay ahead of the pack to bring beautiful new elements to the event experience.

One of our longest technology partnerships has been with Estimote. As far back as 2013, Eventfuel has led the charge, bringing Estimote Beacons to event spaces. While others are still catching up, we’re refining things to ensure even more power, reliability and value for our clients.

We use Estimote Beacons to power check-in, so instead of people queuing up, we can enable the check-in of large groups simultaneously. We do this by having their app automatically detect when they enter an event venue. The app then acts as a pass, allowing attendees to quickly enter and get on with networking and having fun!

Behind the scenes, the Eventfuel app detects one or more of the Estimote Beacons that we place around the check-in area and communicates with the Eventfuel cloud platform to discover if those beacons represent a known event. If our platform then responds with details of an event, the app then directs the delegate to the login screen.

At the Sephora event this meant check-in with two staff members was able to check in all 150 delegates in less than 30 minutes. A lot of this efficiency was because checking attendees in only required a quick glance by staff as they passed the desk.

We use Estimote Beacons to help us with location awareness by placing them around a venue and having our app report on what beacons can be seen. If the beacons are laid out well this can enable event organisers to detect a general location of a delegate at any given time. We have used this to great effect in larger events where multiple workshops were run simultaneously. Because we knew where delegates are and where they are supposed to be (assigned workshops) we can send them automated notifications if they are in the wrong place.

Sephora used this to great effect at their event to know who was present in different locations throughout the day. This meant they could send staff to different locations and know which sessions were more attractive than others, deepening the feedback they got from session ratings.

Another powerful use of Estimote Beacons is sending location/context specific messages to delegates when they approach certain objects. For example when a delegate approaches a sponsor’s banner, we use beacons to send information about that sponsor.

Sephora also used location notifications to communicate to delegates in particular sessions about what was happening or upcoming. This was especially useful for running live polls with all the people in the room to ask questions to the presenters or ask for feedback about the session.

In essence all of these features boil down to the same underlying technology: detecting and then reporting beacons. Importantly reporting needs to happen with minimal delay for it to be useful. If WiFi is unreliable, the reporting of beacons becomes delayed and locations are “old” before that information gets registered on the server.

To add to our high tech partners, we’ve recently partnered with a team based in Australia called PopUp WiFi who have solved the problem of unreliable WiFi. They developed the world’s first portable WiFi for hire. It’s powered by 4G and goes to any event space, indoors and out. Using multiple connections, powerful antennae and intelligent traffic control, they can provide internet in a venue instantly. They even frequent unusual settings like wineries and beaches, far from any cable internet. Working with a provider like PopUp WiFi means our beacon interaction technology can work flawlessly anywhere in the world, freeing event planners to choose surprising venues that really make an impact.

In a world where event planners are dreaming up a million ways that participants’ own devices can be used and delegates are looking for seamlessness, the industry can only benefit from working with people who stay one step ahead of the game. Powerful partnerships with technology innovators allow events people to keep dreaming and pushing the technology harder, knowing that the tech providers will gladly respond to the challenge.

Niko Roberts, Co-founder & CEO at Eventfuel

Recently, we told you about two approaches to physical-world context: Proximity vs Location, and praised the simplicity of the former—“tag” a certain area with a beacon and your app can detect when the user enters and exits that area. At the very core of this approach lies an API called “monitoring”, which allows apps to detect when somebody is entering and exiting the range of beacons. This method is baked into iOS’s native Core Location framework & iBeacon support, and is what most beacon apps are using. However, as we learned over time from our community, it’s farfromperfect.

Today, we’re releasing Estimote Monitoring. It addresses many of the problems with Core Location Monitoring, enabling your beacon apps to deliver much better microlocation experience. Let us walk you through what exactly Estimote Monitoring improves over Core Location Monitoring and and how to integrate it with your own app.

Step 1: identifying the problems

When the amount of feedback we received on Core Location Monitoring reached a critical mass, our first step was to round up the most important problems and areas for improvement:

1. I do not get enter/exit where I expect it

Core Location Monitoring is an extremely simple mechanism: it fires an “enter” event when the beacon’s signal strength (RSSI) crosses a fixed threshold. But signal strength depends on the beacon’s transmit power, the environment, radio wave physics, etc, which makes it very difficult to “calibrate” where exactly the “enter” should happen. A single spike in RSSI can cause the event to trigger much further than you’d expect.

2. I get erratic exits and enters

With Core Location Monitoring, it often happens that even if you’re right next to a beacon, it’ll trigger a “false” exit—and a second or two later, an “enter”. This flickering can ruin the desired experience and leads developers to add their own workarounds, usually in form of a debouncer. That however increases the code complexity and its maintenance burden, just to tackle a bug in the API.

3. Exit events have a fixed 30-second timeout

To receive an exit event you need to wait approximately 30 seconds after leaving a beacon’s range. It’s supposed to prevent ‘false positive’ exits caused by RSSI spikes, but we developers like being given options to customize the behavior of the APIs. Many use cases warrant much lower timeouts and it should be up to the developer to decide how long after leaving beacon’s range an action in their app is taken. The delay also makes testing Core Location Monitoring a nightmare!

4. I can only monitor up to 20 regions

Core Location Monitoring limits the number of regions you can monitor at a time to 20. What’s more, not everyone is aware that the 20-region limit applies to both beacons and GPS geofences—so if you’re monitoring for 20 beacons, it leaves you no space for geofences.

This limit made developers come up with clunky workarounds: juggling which beacons they monitor depending on the user’s GPS location, short-term ranging in the background, etc. That’s even more complexity, making beacon integrations harder to write and maintain.

Step 2: Estimote Monitoring is born

Once we identified all the potential areas for improvement, we attacked… each and every one of them!

What we have actually done?

• We took the Estimote Location packet from our Location Beacons, designed to improve Indoor Location, and based Estimote Monitoring on that.
• This means that we’re no longer restricted by the 20-region iBeacon limit.
• We’re giving developers more granular enters/exits not just for beacon’s range—inspired by original iBeacon concept of proximity zones, we have enter/exit events for three distances: near (around 1.5 m), medium (around 7 m), and far (around 15 m).
  
• The whole thing works so well, that we removed the exit timeout completely. The exit event is triggered as soon you you exit the zone.

Ta-da! All 4 problems addressed!

How to use it

At this time, Estimote Monitoring works exclusively with Estimote Location Beacons. First, you need to to configure your beacons and enable the Estimote Location packet. You can find instructions here.

When your beacons are all set, you can test the improved enter and exit events with the Notify Demo in Estimote iOS app. Make sure to switch to the Estimote Location packet using the button in the top-right corner of the radar screen!

I want to use it in my own app:

Enabling Estimote Monitoring in your own app is possible with just a few lines of code. Import the Estimote iOS SDK into your project and find the identifier of the beacon you want to use—it’s on your Estimote Cloud dashboard. Then use this code snippet for the selected beacon:

let monitoringManager = ESTMonitoringManager()
monitoringManager.delegate = self
monitoringManager.startMonitoringForIdentifier("BEACON-CLOUD-IDENTIFIER", inProximity: .Near)
...
func monitoringManager(manager: ESTMonitoringManager, didEnterRangeOfIdentifier identifier: String) {
      print("Entered range of beacon \(identifier)")
}
func monitoringManager(manager: ESTMonitoringManager, didExitRangeOfIdentifier identifier:String) {
      print("Exited range of beacon \(identifier)")
}

I want to create a new app:

We have a template just for you! Use the Estimote Cloud apps dashboard to add a new app, and choose the Estimote Monitoring Notification app template. We’ll automatically generate an Xcode project with all the code and beacon identifiers already in place.

What do YOU think?

Our work on Estimote Monitoring definitely doesn’t stop here, and with your help, we’re confident we can make it even better in the coming future! Share your thoughts on our forums or drop us an email. Give it a go and let us know how you like it!

Bartek & Alex, Beacon Reliability Engineers at Estimote

Tinkering with three beacons is one thing, deploying thousands over hundreds of locations is another. Yet another thing is operating a fleet of beacons. That’s why we developed remote fleet management that ensures any change to beacons’ configuration happens automatically, and the Estimote Deployment app, which made hardware upgrades as easy as updating software.

But robust as the beacons are, there will always be things you didn’t foresee. That’s why today we’re adding Beacon Health Check to the mix, so that you’re notified if your beacon falls off a wall, is stolen, is running low on battery, or stops broadcasting altogether.

Our latest beacons, i.e. Location Beacons and Proximity Beacons with NFC, can broadcast our own Estimote Telemetry packet that is picked up by Estimote SDK. The telemetry data is then forwarded to Estimote Cloud, which constantly monitors and analyzes it to determine if everything is fine with your beacons. In case our algorithms detect a problem, you will receive an email and a notification in Estimote Cloud.

Since Beacon Health Check relies on the hardware and software innovations we have come up with, it requires either Location Beacons or Proximity Beacons with NFC and Estimote SDK to work. Apps integrated with Estimote SDK handle monitoring. It’s completely hassle-free and secure: it requires no action from the beacon owner or app’s user, has negligible impact on battery, and cannot be used to collect any data other than beacon telemetry.

Beacon Health Check is available to our enterprise software-as-a-service customers, if you want to use fleet monitoring please contact business@estimote.com

Bartek Bałaziński, Product Manager at Estimote

Dear Developers in the Estimote Community,

Three years ago we kicked off the contextual computing era by shipping you the first Estimote Beacons. With our simple mobile SDKs, we enabled the creation of rich location-aware apps and experiences. One year later we followed up with Estimote Stickers, the world’s smallest beacons which also included built-in sensors. For the first time, apps that the developer community could build were truly contextualized—both presence to a nearby beacon as well as interaction with real world objects. More recently we released Estimote Location Beacons, which today are the most advanced beacons on the market. With a long-range radio, built-in NFC and a programmable GPIO slot, they enable you to control every-day devices just by approaching them.

The world’s first video beacon

Today we want to move contextual computing to a completely new level. We are happy to announce our newest product: Estimote Mirror. It’s the world’s first video-enabled beacon. Estimote Mirror can not only communicate with nearby phones and their corresponding apps, but also take content from these apps and display it on any digital screen around you.

How does Mirror work?

Mirror works with any standard video screen– it simply plugs into the HDMI and USB ports. When connected to a TV via HDMI, Mirror reads BLE signals from nearby compatible apps or Estimote Stickers to recieve content, and a programmable rendering engine decides what to display, while USB is used as an endless supply of power. And mobile developers don’t have to learn any new technology to control these large digital displays with Mirror. They can just embed our SDK into their apps so that users can trigger contextual and personalized content simply by approaching screens where Estimote Mirror is installed.

What are the applications?

We believe the best applications will be those that deliver great user experiences and remove friction from our daily lives. Imagine you have a connecting flight and have just landed at your first destination. You likely have your airline’s app installed on the phone in your pocket. Because you’re logged-in, your phone knows your flight time, departure gate and other relevant details, like whether your outbound flight is delayed. When you approach an airport flight monitoring screen, it will simply react to your presence. Personalized content will be mirrored directly from your airline app. It’s the mobile SDK which casts BLE instructions and content to the nearby video-enabled beacon.

Watch our video to see more use-cases.

Imagine magical experiences without mobile apps

Mirror can react not only to users with installed apps, but also by sensing for BLE signals from objects around it. Content can be displayed on-screen when nearby BLE signals are detected. For example, Estimote Stickers attached to objects will send contextual data when picked up or moved. Mirror will detect these interactions and display content tied to a particular object or gesture. This allows consumers in a retail store to experience magical interactive moments even if they don’t have the retailer’s app installed.

The technology inside Estimote Mirror

From an engineering perspective every Estimote Mirror is a tiny, powerful computer with a full-blown operating system. We embed a System-on-Chip with built-in video processing similar to the one installed in your modern smartphone. Responsive and delightful interactions are possible thanks to a uniquely optimized firmware which we built in to the most powerful BLE chip available on the market. And there’s also Wi-Fi onboard for developers who want to connect to the cloud, all powered by USB, so no additional wires are required. Mirror will be compatible with Estimote Cloud and the rest of our stack and will be shipped with SDKs, documentation, customizable app templates and demo apps exactly same way we ship our other products.

Pre-order your Mirror now

Today we’re excited to launch this product at TechCrunch Disrupt 2016 in San Francisco, so if you are nearby come visit our the booth to see live demos and grab a BLE-enabled T-shirt!

We’ll be shipping the first batches of devices this winter.

Pre-order Mirror
Be one of the first to develop contextual screen apps.

Tech companies often kid themselves they have cross-functional teams. But if you have, say, a mobile app team that has a product owner, iOS plus Android developers, and a mobile UI specialist… where’s the cross-funcionality, exactly? At Estimote we preach that context is king and teams with a delusion of cross-functionality can never really understand user’s context. And then the product suffers.

Earlier this year we decided to put our money where our mouth is. We embarked on an experiment to restructure the whole company around the context of our customers and their journey with Estimote products. Here’s the first part of what we learned. Estimote team at work

What happened?

We used to have typical product teams. We had teams responsible for Estimote Cloud, the SDK, hardware, our mobile apps, and Estimote Indoor Location. We were following the common knowledge that it lets companies move quickly and affords them flexibility. It’s often not the case.

To give you an example: we have thousands of people using Estimote Cloud. Some of them have just three beacons and they use the cloud to generate and store their app projects. Others have deployed hundreds of beacons and Estimote Cloud’s web dashboard is where they manage them. Some resell beacons as part of their own products and mostly use the dashboard to reassign beacon ownership to their clients. It all falls under the umbrella of Estimote Cloud but it’s one hell of an umbrella. How is one product team supposed to manage all these scenarios?

We wanted more context in our product development. So we asked the whole team - what’s the best way to work? How do we want to structure? For two days, Estimote was divided into groups of five or six people, each with the same task of figuring out how we should structure the company to reflect the customer’s context.

The discussions were framed in terms of our vision - building an OS for the physical world. But the how was defined by each and every one of us. We had top-down vision and bottom-up here’s how we should do this”. We wanted different perspectives to cross-pollinate, so the groups consisted of people who didn’t work directly with each other on a daily basis.

After two full days of heated discussions, every group submitted their ideas. The management then took a couple of days to review them and shape the final structure. What emerged was a company built around the customer’s journey, with each team responsible for developing and maintaining products that serve our customers on one stage of this journey.

What has changed?

We’ve settled on the following teams that represent subsequent steps of the journey:

Awareness Awareness team’s goal is to make sure developers around the world know and love Estimote. This means inspiring and educating people about beacons, contextual computing, and microlocation via this very blog, social media, and our YouTube channel.

E-Commerce The EComm team takes over when someone shows purchase intent. From SEO, to the website, to the purchase flow and shipping, they make sure everything goes smooth and visitors convert into customers. And if you ever needed to change the address of your order, they’re the folks you talked with.

Developer Experience The moment a customer receives their devkit from Estimote, they’re in the hands of the DevEx team. User onboarding, demo apps, tutorials, basically anything that helps developers get up and running with our stack. They recently brought you the updated Proximity Beacons with NFC support.

Integration The next stage is moving from prototyping to figuring out how to integrate Estimote Beacons into your app. Integration team takes care of the SDKs and documentation to enable you to do just that. Oh, and by the way, they just released a huge update to Estimote Stickers.

Deployment That’s our in-house group of mad scientists that know everything there is to know about deploying and maintaining the physical infrastructure of beacons. Optimizing beacon placement for best possible signal coverage, Indoor Location SDK, walking customers through the nitty-gritty of rolling out hundreds of beacons: that’s their daily bread. The Deployment app that lets you upgrade your whole beacon network in no time is their handiwork.

SaaS You have your app polished and published, the beacons are placed, all is going well. Now what? Now you want to be sure that managing your fleet of beacons is painless. That’s where the SaaS team comes in. Their latest update was Estimote Here & Now messaging technology.

We’re still doing a lot of work that doesn’t belong to a single part of the customer journey. The Operations team handles administrative tasks that let the Estimote ship sail smoothly. RF Reliability is, paraphrasing Matt Damon, sciencing the sh*t out of Bluetooth so other teams build on their work. Customer Success is here to make sure that Estimote users can scale up their projects and transition between consecutive stages of the journey. They, along with a couple of others, all exist as standalone teams, which does not mean they’re not a part of the core structure. You can think about them as the foundations and the scaffolding of Estimote. Without them we couldn’t build anything else.

Yeah, but does it work?

We have redefined what a product means to us. We now treat each step in the customer’s journey as a product. For example, Developer Experience’s product is not a single element of our stack but rather a complete set of experiences a new customer has with beacons or stickers in their first few days of prototyping. That means taking ownership of all the interactions between a developer and Estimote tools, be it changing beacon settings with the Estimote app, downloading an App Template from Estimote Cloud, or submitting a support ticket because their first project doesn’t compile. We kept intact the agile mix of daily standups, two-week sprints, and scrumboards but it’s lighter than a vanilla scrum. Each team has some autonomy to tweak the process to their needs. If Awareness organizes a hackathon and Deployment develops a new algorithm for Indoor Location, it’s only natural they’ll do it differently.

For this to work, product managers need more diverse competences on their teams than in a standard structure. Previously, our team responsible for Estimote apps consisted of mobile developers and UI designers. That’s an illusion of cross-functionality, exactly the problem mentioned in the beginning. For comparison, aforementioned Developer Experience also needs a hardware engineer, a community manager, and a technical writer. SDK team used to be mobile and backend developers but Integration also requires embedded developers to work on beacon firmware.

This caused some chaos with new teams assessing their needs and competences but now we start to appreciate the agility it affords. Dependencies used to slow down development previously, because if you’re trying to move fast, you always end up with more work than people. Giving teams ownership of everything in their step of the customer journey means more independence. And independence is a good rule of thumb for assessing your team’s cross-functionality. More independence means shipping more often. If dependencies slow you down, maybe you’re not that cross-functional?

And what about consistency? On this end, we’re not straying far from a more typical structure. We borrowed an idea from Spotify’s engineering culture. People who share a skill set meet regularly to compare best practices and stay on the same page with brand guidelines. We call them Guilds (we’re not using the word in the same way as Spotify). The incredible thing about Guilds is that they’re a bottom-up initiative. No one told Estimote developers to meet weekly to watch and discuss talks about programming. No one asked product owners to sit down together regularly to chat about different aspects of shipping. It’s a byproduct of people taking ownership.

Estimote team, still at work

Estimote journey

Building product teams around the customer journey is an experiment. And one that makes sense specifically at Estimote due to the nature of our product.

With a typical SaaS product, the funnel is straightforward. You get people to see your website, then some of them convert to a free trial, and then some of these convert to paying customers. In our case, it’s more complex. We convert some visitors into customers and they buy a devkit. Some of them start prototyping. Some of those prototypes are turned into apps. Some of the apps move to a pilot stage. Some pilots become large scale deployments. The cycle can take months and consists of enough stages for our approach to make sense.

Still, the transition hasn’t been exactly smooth and it took us a couple of weeks to adjust. But since then, it’s been going along quite well. We ship faster. We talk to customers more. The feedback loop between Estimote and our users is much shorter. Only in the past few weeks we launched our latest and greatest video beacon, Mirror, presented Estimote Monitoring to deliver better microlocation interactions, started shipping the next generation of Proximity Beacons with NFC,and updated Location Beacons with 200m range. Not bad, huh?

Of course there’s still a TON of work to be done and improvements to be made. And we’re constantly looking for new people to join the mission of creating an OS for the physical world, so if you feel like that’s a place where you belong, don’t hesitate to get in touch!

Wojtek Borowicz, Community Evangelist at Estimote

On talking, doing, and pain

A couple weeks back, we published a story about restructuring Estimote to create a more cross-functional team layout centered around customer context. Now it’s time for part two, and to talk more about how the new system works when confronted with reality.

One of the mantras learned in Y Combinator (and we repeat often) is that startups should only do two things: Build the product and talk to the customers. How we put it in practice might sound counterintuitive, though.

If it doesn’t hurt, you’re doing it wrong

We believe in the YC mantra so strongly that… we don’t have a customer service team. Say what?! Here’s the deal: instead of having one customer service team, we made each team talk to the customers in their part of the funnel.

Talking to users is the responsibility of each team’s community manager, or for later-stage teams, the product manager. Admittedly, it was one of the toughest elements about the transition to the new structure. The “first reply time”, our key metric for customer service, skyrocketed as we were adjusting our support processes, and it took us a while to bring it back to a manageable level.

But the early struggle is worth the long-term benefit. Having each team talk to people with exactly the issues they’re working on dramatically shortens the feedback loop. By complaints, suggestions, and needs being made so immediately visible to the product teams, data driven decisions (and problems to solve) are literally right at their fingertips. This allows for more focus and faster iteration.

With a dedicated support team, it’s easy to fall into the trap of measuring their effectiveness in closed tickets. That’s nonsense. Our goal is to solve problems, not tickets. Putting product teams in front of the customers is a big step towards solving problems more effectively.

Plus, we accidentally discovered an additional upside. Developers and product managers aren’t always fans of spending their time answering customer inquiries. By putting them in customer-facing roles, we push them out of their comfort zone. And the only way for the team members to grow personally (and for us to grow as a company) is to force ourselves to leave that comfort zone. Just like with exercise, if your muscles don’t hurt afterwards, you’re doing it wrong.

So we started exploring other areas where we can push the boundaries of the comfort zone. Thanks to that, Estimote product managers now write blog posts about their products.

Data scientists hard at work

First rule of startups: don’t die

Last year we started using blog post driven development as our variation on user stories. But it focused on outlining a blog post as a first step to nailing what users really need. Now, actually writing the post is another step in the release cycle. Not all our product managers like writing. In fact, some hate it. But as Stephen King put it: writing is refined thinking. It makes product teams understand their work better and focus on delivering value for the customers. Because how could you craft a compelling message if you don’t have a compelling product?

Of course we don’t just hand product managers a piece of paper and say now, write. Our Awareness team and content creators help with that, but the ultimate goal is to have a product team involved in every aspect of the product’s life. Even if it hurts.

We’re taking a big risk here, because there still is the issue of balance. Coming back to the exercise metaphor: it should hurt, but if you work yourself out to the point of passing out from dehydration, it’s even worse than sitting on a couch sipping soda. It’s crucial that we don’t make product managers scramble for time to actually build their products. We’re still establishing best practices here. But we don’t want to do this with arbitrary, made-up constraints like use 10% of your time to answer customers and another 10% to write. The best place to start is common sense. If you’re straying so far from your comfort zone that it’s getting more frustrating than challenging, take a step back. Discuss with your team. Delegate. Don’t pass out from dehydration. Ask for help.

No pain, no gain is so clichéd it hardly needs saying. What does need talking about is the balance. How much pain is in this sweet spot right beyond your comfort zone, helping you grow and develop new skills. How do you not cross that line? To figure it out, you need to take risks, but also be flexible and react quickly if something doesn’t work. Just like startups are supposed to. We hit the balance with making product teams take over customer service and going deeper into the blog post-driven development.

Our recruiter Sunny, sourcing talent to interview

If you feel like this is the right environment for you, don’t hesitate to reach out and join Estimote!

Wojtek Borowicz, Community Evangelist at Estimote

As Alan Kay once said, “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”

We strongly believe in this idea, and put it into practice daily. That’s why we build a sophisticated stack of software and hardware technologies to create the best possible interactions. We need to iterate fast, and make platform improvements available as soon as possible. Each improvement requires work in all pieces of our software stack. Beacon firmware is no exception. However, it’s the most challenging part to distribute. Today, we make this process invisible by introducing Automatic Firmware Update.

Beacon Firmware is never final, there’s always something new ahead

In simple words, your firmware is an operating system for your beacon. It is responsible for the hardware and software management of the device. We believe that a beacon OS has to be intelligent. Estimote devices are packed with different sensors. Firmware consumes their data to better understand the context and environment your beacon is in. This allows for simplification of the deployment process and makes configuration management easier. This year we’ve already introduced seven major updates, delivering features like multi-packet support and new power modes.

We’ve improved beacon firmware to integrate it with new services. Beacon Health Check and Here & Now marketing platforms are the best examples. These new services empower beacon deployment, and enable the creation of completely new user experiences based on Estimote devices.

Hardware product compatibility is another important source of change and evolution. Let’s use Estimote Mirror video beacons as an example. Introduced only a month ago, they turn every screen into a smart and contextually aware display. They enable a completely new user experience delivered on top of beacons. To make the most out of that combination, your beacons might require some changes to their operating system so that the whole platform works flawlessly, and provides even more delightful experiences.

Beacon management was once challenging at scale

Challenges can appear when working with many devices already deployed in the field. It requires well-planned logistics, a set of tools, and trained people on hand. Imagine a shop with 500 devices delivering context and location of products. Each beacon is deployed in a different spot. It’s often hidden to make it blend into the surroundings, and lets users focus on the magical experience. To keep your beacons up to date, you need to visit every single device, and spend a while next to it every time we give you some fresh and exciting upgrades. It doesn’t sound like the optimal solution, does it?

We’ve solved configuration at scale by introducing Remote Fleet Management. This mechanism allows you to integrate the configuration capabilities into any of your apps. While in use, every single instance of the application can apply pending settings centralized in Estimote Cloud. Remote Fleet Management strongly improves the time of configuration, making your changes effective in a matter of minutes. No trained crew and dedicated hardware is required, resulting in killer savings in terms of both time and money. Likewise, it’s optimized for power and network usage, so your clients aren’t charged either!

Firmware update joins Remote Fleet Management

We always ship beacons with the latest firmware possible. Beacons are used for many years, though… up to 7 years! To keep them fresh, we’ve introduced an Over-The-Air firmware update mechanism. Sophisticated under the hood, yet it’s easy for users! Single devices can be wirelessly updated with a single command, and it takes less than a minute to perform.

Now we make this mechanism a part of Remote Fleet Management! Visiting every single device to perform an update is no longer a necessity. Firmware updates can be remotely requested from the cloud and automatically applied by your users.

Make firmware updates automatic

Every single firmware update is backward compatible and properly tested. That means you don’t need to worry it will break your current setup. In this circumstance, it’s the best approach to keep your beacons always up-to-date. We let you do this by introducing the Automatic Firmware Update. With a single setting in the Estimote Cloud you can now forget about firmware updates completely! Every new version we provide will be automatically uploaded to your beacons, making amazing new features available for your use immediately.

To make the firmware updates even more efficient at scale, we are introducing Incremental Firmware Updates. This feature is a transparent iteration over previous implementation of Over-The-Air firmware updates. Original implementations could fail from time to time due to unexpected interruptions with connection to the device. To complete firmware updates, we had to start over from the beginning of the process. Incremental Firmware Updates reconnects and continues the beacon’s firmware update from an interrupted point automatically and transparently for the user. This makes updates process much faster and more reliable.

Automatic Firmware Updates in practice

Using the Automatic Firmware Updates feature is extremely simple. All you need to do is enable it using the Estimote Cloud Dashboard or Estimote Cloud API.

Firmware updates are performed on the mobile devices with the help of our Bulk Updater. We recommend you start by using one of our Bulk Updater App Templates written in Swift and Objective-C. Provided as a source code, it will act as a basic tool showing correct implementation simultaneously.

If you are ready to integrate this feature within your own application, it’s as simple as the Bulk Updater initialisation using the code snippet below:

The Firmware Update works in both the foreground and background. It’s optimized to preserve battery, and minimize network usage.

Check it out today, and let us know what you think!

Marcin Klimek, Product Manager at Estimote

Estimote Beacons appeared on the market as simple broadcasting devices. Over the years, they’ve become smarter and more powerful—capable of locally processing dynamically generated data from sensors or GPIO input. With the introduction of Estimote Mirror, they’ve gained video capabilities to display contextually relevant information on any screen. All these innovations are making Estimote products essential in delivering context, and embracing the Internet of Things concept. Today’s announcement push us further this way enabling new IoT architectures like Edge Computing.

Beacons essential for IoT

The Internet of Things is a network between intelligent devices communicating with each other. This communication enables them to exchange information, understand context, and act on it. Thanks to huge internet accessibility, most sensors collect and send raw data to the cloud where actual processing takes place. The alternative for this centralized, cloud based architecture is Edge Computing: a topology where single sensor devices can perform computation locally. It allows for shortening the response time, improves reliability of the network, and lowers internet bandwidth use.

Edge computing requires sensors like beacons to be much more advanced. Recently, hardware improvements like Nordic’s nRF52 chip and more efficient energy sources made it possible to both improve computation power and make devices live longer. Bluetooth 5 standard, announced this year, strongly advances communication speeds, too.

Today, we are proud to announce the last piece of the puzzle to fully enable Edge Computing: local data storage!

Introducing Beacon Data Storage API

In simple words, Beacon Local Storage allows for storing any data on the beacon. You can use the available 128 kB of storage to keep text, pictures, or even audio data. Each data piece is available under the predefined string based key. Think of it as common dictionary like API familiar to any developer. Data can be written using the Beacon Local Storage API during an authorized connection to the beacon. Reading of the data does not require authorization, and can be performed fully offline by simply using a Bluetooth LE connection.

Beacon Local Storage can greatly boost existing projects. Make your shopping experience more relevant, based on customers visits. Migrate your hardcoded data from the mobile application to the spot it is truly related to. Deliver dynamic data offline in spaces where internet connection is poor. Improve the security of your deployment that requires physical presence.

A new world of experiences is possible as well! Make an offline loyalty app that collects secure codes from the beacons. Leave local messages dynamically generated by the people physically visiting a place. Create offline games for which delivered content can evolve over time. Your imagination is the limit!

How it works

To access Beacon Data Storage, we introduced a new API called Beacon Data Storage API to our Location Beacons. It is available through the Estimote SDK. Each device you discover is capable of an offline/online connection, delivering API to access read and write functionality. To perform the write operation, just use the code snippet below:

Reading data from the beacons is similarly simple:

You can also take a look at examples we’ve prepared for both iOS and Android platforms.

To ensure security, Estimote Cloud based authorization is required for the write operation, thus you need to have an internet connection. Reading data from the device is publicly available and completely offline. If data stored on the device needs to be secured, any encryption mechanism can be used before saving data to the beacon.

Are you as pumped as us? Drop as an email to contact@estimote.com. We would love to hear about your ideas for Beacon Data Storage.

Marcin Klimek, Product Manager at Estimote

It’s been almost a year since we introduced App Templates in Estimote Cloud. Every week, developers from the Estimote Community use them to generate hundreds of apps. It’s the fastest way to learn the beacon basics: sending notifications, changing content based on the nearest beacon, and more.

Today, we’re taking it a step further by expanding App Templates into entire use cases, such as a seamless loyalty-program experience. Just click a button, and you get a high-quality app ready to tweak, show around, and put into production. You save time, money, and leverage our expertise with simply one download!

Building great apps is hard

We launched the original App Templates to improve the onboarding experience in beacon technology. Rather than a long list of features, how about a catalog of small demo apps to experience the possibilities first-hand? And how about giving you the code behind those apps? You can likely re-use it in your own project, after all.

But building context-enabled apps is difficult on many fronts! While our current templates make it easier to get started with the basics, there’s so much more to learn. Which use cases benefit the most from added real-world context? How do you design a great user experience? How do you address common privacy and Bluetooth battery usage concerns among end-users?

Sharing our know-how

At Estimote, we live and breathe contextual computing. We were the first to ship beacons. We’ve worked with both startups and huge enterprises, across many industries. In the process, we’ve gathered a heap of knowledge and experience. So we asked ourselves, how can we best share it with our customers and help them succeed?

A 500-page book on the theory of developing beacon apps? Uh, no…

How about we condense our know-how into something more practical for app designers and developers: ready-made apps!

We’re kicking it off with our vision of a perfect loyalty-program experience, bringing you the Loyalty app template.

New app template: Loyalty

The Loyalty template is actually two apps: an iPhone app for consumers, and an iPad app for cashiers. Under the hood, the apps work together with Estimote Beacons to create a magical experience.

Imagine the next time you order a coffee, walking up to a beacon-ified cash register. The cashier sees you appear on the iPad screen, and awards you points for your purchase. All this happens without having to pull out your phone, let alone a loyalty card or having to scan a QR code.

It doesn’t get more seamless than that!

Want to redeem your points for free coffee? The cashier deducts points from your account on the iPad, and you get that hot cup of happiness for free. ☕️

We crafted the template with a beautiful design, high-quality code, and best practices. For the backend, our template integrates Firebase, so you don’t need to run your own servers.

Impressive prototypes that don’t break the bank

The expanded app templates are a great asset to help you win app-development contracts, or secure a budget for a new project. What better way to impress prospective clients or company stakeholders, than pitching with a fully-functional app!

Of course, you can’t afford spending weeks to build out a prototype before you secure the return on your investment. Time is money, and when it comes to building mobile apps, we’re talking about thousands of dollars.

With the new app templates, we’re making it possible by offering them to you for a fraction of the cost. You can buy the Loyalty template for $849 directly from Estimote Cloud.

You’ll get source code you can customize to your needs, and a short instruction on how to set everything up—which shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes. Support, and free updates with minor changes and improvements are also included.

More templates coming soon

The Loyalty template is our first, but it’s not our last. Our know-how goes well beyond just loyalty program use cases, and we’re already working on more templates. Any specific app on your mind that you think we should be adding next? Let us know!

Existing technologies work fairly well when helping consumers extract value from their locations… except when they are indoors. You can find the nearest drugstore with Google Maps, but it won’t help you find the shampoo you’re looking for. You can find the Pokemon you are looking for on the street, but good luck once you’re inside the mall. We spend as much time inside as we do outside. Unfortunately, just like when we’re trying to find the latest restaurant without GPS, we can get lost indoors all the same!

At Estimote, we believe that context is king, and the context of knowing exactly where you are is the king of kings! That’s why we released the Indoor Location solution two years ago, and we have since iterated on it till it can fuel all possible needs. Today we are launching a significant update to Estimote Indoor Location, bringing the accuracy level needed for all your apps to flourish.

The king of kings - the context of where you are

That grounding feeling of knowing exactly where you are is incomparable to anything else. Whether you are lost in the large unknown office looking for that one specific conference room, or lost in the midst of countless shop aisles trying to find the exact product you always use it would be ideal to never get lost and always know where the items you seek are located. With Estimote Indoor Location, users of your app can know exactly where everything is in relation to their particular place.

The context of knowing exact locations can be leveraged even further. Knowing where the bulk of your customers are congregating can let you proactively assure there are enough employees in the area to assist and advise them. Finding each other in the large office is way easier when not only do you know where you are, but also knowing where your coworker or interviewer is located. And it doesn’t end there! Just think about what the context of position allowed Pokemon Go or Uber to deliver to their users.

We listened and we iterated. We listened more, and we iterated more.

When we launched the very first version of Indoor Location, it worked in small spaces and required you to place beacons at chest height. We listened to your feedback, and got back to work. Just a few months later, we released an update with improved stability and accuracy, followed by a massive upgrade to the mapping tool: better optimized for larger spaces.

Working with really large locations was one of our customers’ pain points. Beacon placement was another one. Soon we released the Indoor Light navigation mode. While it could be a bit less responsive, it proved to be way more stable and fitting for such demanding conditions. We even made it work in background, to let you leverage the user position constantly for even more interesting use cases!

Give the people what they need - precise user positioning

The accuracy provided by Indoor Light navigation mode was good, but not good enough for too many use cases. Today, we are proud to present to you its highly improved version! Not only have we increased the position granularity, resulting in vastly improved accuracy. We also improved its responsiveness and stability. All of these features allow you to leverage the context of knowing precisely where you are.

Navigating through large locations can be hard with screens of mobile devices, and it certainly was with the previous version of the app. For a better experience, we have completely redesigned the app, making it more intuitive, with smooth transitions, and added common drag, pan, and zoom gestures for easier usage of the maps. It is also in the SDK to let you immediately build your first proof of concept.

Don’t just take our word for it. Just try it yourself! Everything you need is the Estimote Indoor Location app and just a few Estimote Location Beacons!

Got any questions or ideas to share?Let us know!

Despite being a hardware startup, Estimote has always been equally focused on software services as we’ve been on hardware. Estimote Indoor Location, Fleet Management, Security, Analytics… all have very significant software components, and were possible because of the close control we have over beacon hardware, firmware, SDKs, and Estimote Cloud.

Our software has been battle-tested by tens of thousands of developers, startups, agencies, and corporations, and we are confident in its value to a beacon deployment project. That’s why today, we are announcing tiered pricing for Estimote Cloud subscriptions and general software products.

This is a major milestone for the beacon ecosystem at large, marking the maturity that the market and Estimote have reached together.

Match of deployment phase and services

We have customers large and small, some having just a handful of beacons, some deploying hundreds of thousands, and we understand the challenges at all phases of a successful beacon project. That’s why we matched the beacon project life cycle phase with services offered, and thus cost. Our goal is to make developers focus on delivering magical experiences to the end users, not on selecting the right Estimote Cloud subscription.

For example, customers in the proof-of-concept phase do not need Beacon Health Check. However, once you go full-scale into production with thousands of beacons in dozens of locations, this service will prove extremely helpful in ensuring the smooth operation of designed experiences.

Staying developer-friendly

Estimote has always been and will continue to be a developer-oriented company, and we want developers to have a chance to evaluate our entire stack at their leisure.

That’s why at the heart of our pricing strategy lies a developer-friendly evaluation plan, which gives access to all elements of our stack not limited by time, but a very reasonable limit of 20 devices, which we believe is plenty for evaluation purposes. This also means that multiple developers in the same organization can prototype on their own, as long as they aren’t working on the same app.

Grandfathering existing users

We appreciate the trust and feedback provided by our existing customers. Therefore, existing Estimote Cloud users will retain access to services they’ve had access to all along, including world-class remote beacon management, security, and analytics. Exact access rights will match our new policy, and will depend on the number of currently-owned beacons.

Only newly registered accounts and freshly-developed services will be subject to the pricing policy.

Software of the future

We are dedicated to making the deployment of beacons and managing your fleet a breeze, and will continue to deliver software services to achieve this goal. The structure we’re introducing today will serve as a framework for us to work further, and develop more software tools to allow managing beacon projects both large and small easier than ever.

This is also our promise to our software customers: You will benefit from our unwavering innovation and support at no additional cost.

Subscribe up to Estimote Cloud at www.estimote.com or contact@estimote.com us if you have any questions, as always.

Bartek Bałaziński, Product Manager at Estimote

This is a guest post by Pilvi Rissanen, Brand Manager Finland at Clear Channel, and Annina Koskiola, CEO and co-founder of Proximi.io

Clear Channel is the world leader in the arena of Digital Out of Home advertising, DOOH. Times Square, Piccadilly Circus, Singapore, Madrid, Stockholm, Helsinki… All bring to mind gigantic LEDs, interactive screens, mobile and dynamic, location-based content with relevant ads.

DOOH Advertising is growing fast - it is currently the second fastest growing media. We believe that mobile is the most important aspect in the future interactive DOOH Advertising concepts, and beacons play a key role in this development.

Therefore, Clear Channel has installed Estimote beacons within our Downtown Digital advertising screens across Helsinki city center. To enable the screen-to-mobile connection, Clear Channel has teamed together with Proximi.io, the unified positioning platform. Proximi.io combines together all the major positioning technologies (iBeacon, Eddystone, geomagnetic positioning, WiFi, GPS, cellular), enabling developers to create location—aware apps with mobile advertising, IoT integrations, or analytics collection in no time. What should this opportunity be used for? How to get the most out of BLE beacons in to create personalized, targeted and interactive advertisement? We want to hear your ideas and opinions!

Are you ready to get Ultrahacked?

Come and show us what you can do with Clear Channel, the Proximi.io platform, and Estimote beacons by joining our challenge at Ultrahack! Ultrahack is a hackathon that strives for a lasting impact - with all the frills and fun that make a hackathon an unforgettable experience. The challenges, posed by Finnish and international corporations, are real problems that the companies are seeking to solve with the help of startups and independent hackers. The winners of each challenge win great prizes, including even investment opportunities between 10,000 - 150,000€. In total, over 1 million Euro will be invested in the Ultrahack projects.

Show how you can create a unique WOW-effect in this environment, achieve international glory, and acquire future opportunities with us. The winner of the Clear Channel challenge is going be working on a real customer project with Clear Channel. We are hoping to see projects that will blow us away, have great visual representation, and can be turned into real campaigns within the weeks following Ultrahack. This challenge would work perfectly together with the following Ultrahack Challenges: Retail, Media and entertainment, MaaS and also the Bonus Round - Mobile Payments. The final project may be using Estimote beacons in a mobile app or in the Physical Web context.

Ultrahack is hosted in Helsinki, Finland 25th -27th November 2016. Travel reimbursements available!

Don’t miss out! Apply fast at https://ultrahack.org. Application deadline closes 18th November 12:00 EET.

More info about Ultrahack and the challenge: https://ultrahack.org/ultrahack2016/tech-beacons More info about Clear Channel Finland: http://clearchannel.fi/?language=en Register a free account and get access to full Proximi.io documentation at: https://proximi.io/ultrahack

In August, we introduced the first version of Estimote Monitoring, with an improvement to microlocation experiences and more developer control over what happens when users enter/exit the beacon’s range (more about it here).

It was the first version of that feature and understandably, had its shortcomings. You gave us tons of valuable feedback, so we had our work cut out for us in the last few months. Here’s what we’ve been up to:

Fewer unexpected notifications

The first issue we addressed in this release can be summarized as such: “I do nothing, and notifications pop up on my screen!” This could be observed in certain areas that are challenging in terms of physics and radio signal responsiveness, like inside a car or in a room with many people inside.

Fewer missed notifications

Another reported Monitoring issue was related to the app being stopped while not in the foreground. After exiting the beacon’s range and staying away for an extended period of time, Monitoring would not respond when a user reapproached. Now it does, every dang time!

Give it a try

We’ve included fixes for the said issues in the latest Estimote SDK. To use the new version of Estimote Monitoring, configure your beacon’s settings accordingly by using the code snippet available here. Then, you can use an app generated in Estimote Cloud if you want to start a project from scratch, or use the template’s code for your own app.

If you have any further suggestions, or if the aforementioned issues occur, please reach out at contact@estimote.com.

Alex & Bartek, Beacon Reliability Engineers at Estimote

The Internet of Things is making the physical world more connected—a mission very dear to us here at Estimote. This is why yesterday in London, we were proud to share our latest innovation with the TechCrunch Disrupt crowd. And today, we’re even more happy to reveal it to everyone: the world’s first, truly low-energy BLE mesh networking.

Estimote Location Beacons can now pass data between one another, and they will still last several years on batteries. Combined with 200 m range, GPIO ports, and our mobile SDKs, this ushers in a new era of connected objects. Just put up a few wireless beacons, and your smartphone app can now reach where it couldn’t before.

Say goodbye to cords and hubs

Connected devices come in all shapes and sizes. However, to stay connected, they all require you to [a] be physically present nearby, [b] be plugged in and have access to WiFi/LTE, or [c] be in range of a gateway that does. This either limits usability (you can’t access beacons/devices you’re not in range of), or makes deployment a hassle (you need to plan for power, WiFi, and gateway coverage).

With Estimote mesh networking, we’ve evolved past these restrictions. You just put up a bunch of small, wireless, battery-powered beacons, and they will relay data from one to another, allowing easy access to remote areas. No hubs, no cords—which means super simple installation and management, ultimately saving time and money.

100% battery-powered, no latency-degrading tricks

Mesh networking in Estimote Beacons uses very little energy, which enables the whole thing to be fully wireless and battery-powered. No need to fiddle with an external power supply, recharge often, or use custom light bulbs to act as the mesh nodes. And the batteries in beacons will still last several years. Because, what good is “wireless mesh” when you still have to plug some things in?

Most importantly, it works 24/7, with latency that doesn’t limit its usability. We don’t hold back like the other “low-power” mesh implementations, which only turn mesh on once a day for a few minutes. With Estimote mesh, data starts flowing right away.

Mesh that’s just a mobile app away

Estimote mesh is a software update for existing Estimote Beacon hardware. This means that, like the beacons themselves, it works over Bluetooth Low Energy, and is compatible with any modern smartphone or tablet. Mobile apps can communicate directly with the mesh network, feeding it with or consuming data.

It’s a big advantage over mesh implementations that use custom protocols, which requires special control panels or smartphone bridges (more hubs, huh).

Send data to mesh from your smartphone, and it starts syncing right away

Boosting remote beacon management

More than a year ago, we introduced Fleet Management API. With mesh networking, we’re adding new remote beacon management powers. Want to enable Estimote Here & Now or Beacon Health Check in your already-deployed beacons? Apply the changes to one beacon, and they will automatically propagate to the rest. Even if there’s nobody physically present in range of them! It makes configuration changes quicker and more robust, and slashes the maintenance costs. Imagine effortless firmware updates, too.

Or, with user-defined packets, you can make your entire beacon mesh network broadcast any data you want, and control that data from anywhere covered by the network. In a subway station, for example, a staff member could use a tablet to control custom packets with service disruption info.

Mesh + GPIO = remote access to 3rd party devices

Combine the settings-syncing powers of the beacon mesh with the general-purpose ports in Estimote Beacons, and … you can control 3rd party devices from any corner of the mesh network!

Say you’re using the GPIO ports to connect to holiday lights in your garden. You can wirelessly turn them on via GPIO settings in one beacon, and the mesh will automatically propagate this command to every other beacon. Within seconds, everything lights up!

Try it now!

Mesh networking is available today, for Long Range Location Beacons, via an over-the-air firmware update. Check out our Mesh tutorial on the Estimote Developer Portal.

Buy Long Range Location Beacons w/ mesh
We ship daily to any country in the world

Here at Estimote, we believe that beacon infrastructure management should be extremely simple. From the very first version of Estimote Beacons, we’ve put a lot of effort to make this true. One of the most important aspects of this is energy efficiency. As a software company, we’ve been constantly pushing ourselves to improve it without hardware changes. As a result we’ve created extremely energy efficient firmware with useful features like Power Modes and Conditional Broadcasting. Today, we move energy management to a whole new level by introducing Beacon Clustering!

Software is the key to deployment efficiency

Hardware is not a solution for building flexible deployments. We could have introduced a range of beacons with different batteries and capabilities a long time ago. But it’s not that easy… multiple form factors would force us to build and maintain different production processes and thus introduce complexity to stock management and shipping. These would limit us heavily in the mission to make beacons as affordable and accessible as possible. It wouldn’t benefit our customer, either.

By setting certain limits and functions to particular products, it can be difficult to suit every possible use case and deployment. What’s even more important, your needs can change over time. You may need a longer lifetime at some point, and with a fixed device range you’re stuck replacing an existing one with the newer.

Gain flexibility with Clusters

We’ve decided to solve all these problems with software. Thanks to Beacon Clustering an unlimited number of physical beacons can act as a single logical unit. All beacons in the cluster are sharing the same settings, but only one is actively broadcasting at any given time. It gives you extreme efficiency and flexibility. For instance, combine two Location Beacons into a Cluster and you will achieve 11 years of battery life on default settings. It’s really easy to manage a cluster. You can add beacons as needed at any time, or if your needs change, remove beacons from the cluster to use elsewhere. This allows you not only to optimize deployment lifetime but also responsiveness, since you can apply more power-hungry settings. The deployment of beacons is much more reliable, as a single logical beacon is represented by a few fully capable hardware devices. Clustering is the most advanced beacon power management feature on the market and it’s patented by Estimote.

Clusters use Estimote Low-Energy Mesh underneath

Estimote was the first company in the world to launch a low-energy BLE mesh network. Clustering is a great example how this breakthrough technology can be used in practice. Thanks to mesh capabilities all clustered beacons are in constant sync. Any configuration change only needs to be sent to a single beacon in a Cluster. It’s then propagated instantly to all the other members - saving hours of expensive, manual configuration time. You can use this same approach to effortlessly flash firmware updates from beacon to beacon. It’s even possible to set up a simple but powerful failover mechanism, where failure of a single device in a cluster can be handled transparently by other cluster members. All these advanced capabilities are available without any additional complexity - you work with the cluster the same way as with a single beacon!

Clustering in practice

To try out this cool new feature, just place two Long Range Location Beacons next to each other and use the Estimote Deployment App in version 1.1 or higher. Just a few simple steps will guide you through the Clustering process.

A created Cluster can then be seen and managed using the Estimote Cloud Dashboard and Remote Fleet management API. Clustering requires firmware 4.10.0 or higher.

Got any questions or ideas to share? Let us know!

Marcin Klimek, Product Manager at Estimote

At Estimote, we believe software of the future will not be created for phones, computers, or tablets. It won’t be inspired by the 4.7 or 12.9 inch piece of glass sitting in our pockets, or on our desks. Instead, the developers and designers of tomorrow will use the physical world as their canvas. People, their personal devices and autonomous machines surrounding them will be the new building blocks for software, with developers designing interactions between them.

For applications to run the same way on different devices, they need an operating system - a universal way to understand the hardware. Applications for the physical world are no different. They need to know the position of the user, what objects are around them, and whether these objects are moving or not. They need a way to understand the world around them - an operating system for the physical world. We’ve been patiently building out the elements of this operating system, piece by piece, since Estimote was founded.

Automapping thanks to Location Beacons with UWB

Today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, we are launching Estimote Automapping. It is a giant leap towards enabling our community to easily install the Operating System for the physical world on top of any location. All you need are Estimote Location Beacons with UWB. Just place them on the walls in your office, retail store, or at home. A few minutes after you finish, an exact floor plan of your location will be automatically created in the cloud. With our easy to use mobile SDKs, you will be able to build your first application for the physical world in no time!

There are so many possible experiences to delight your users - step-by-step navigation, personalized engagement, product navigation. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. You can use the information available even when the user has the phone in their pocket to improve your shop layout or product placement, based on foot traffic. Or even dynamically adjust the number of cashiers or shop assistants, if the number of people changes in an area. Not to mention that in a similar way, you can track critical assets throughout your venue.

What was the problem and how did we solve it?

Until now, the greatest obstacle with developing applications for the physical world was set up. Placing devices in hard to access spots, complex calibration procedures done by a highly technical crew… and you always need a floor plan. It’s hard, it’s complicated, and it’s tedious. It can take hours and cost thousands of dollars. At Estimote, we couldn’t accept that this is as good as it gets.

Our new Location Beacons are the first on the market with a built-in Ultra Wide Band (UWB) radio. Thanks to a process called time-of-flight two-way ranging, the beacons can now know the distance between each other with inch-perfect precision. Leveraging this information, they can calculate their position relative to each other. With the help of the complex algorithms behind our Automapping solution, Estimote Cloud will determine the exact shape of your venue and make it ready for user positioning.

Pre-order your new Location Beacons with UWB now!

We’ve just made creating apps for the physical world easier and faster. Our new Location Beacons with UWB come now 4 in a pack so you can start developing right away!

You can also meet up with us this week, and see our demos at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Pre-order new Location Beacons with Ultra Wideband (UWB)
We will be shipping the first Dev Kits early 2017!

We LOVE games here at Estimote. We even have a company-wide game night once a month! Ever hear of playing a game on your smartphone that requires being in a special place at a very specific moment in time? If you played Pokemon Go this summer, roaming the streets amongst adults and children alike, you know what I’m talking about. Did you know that Estimote beacons could be used for building similar context-aware games?

Locatify is an Icelandic software company that specializes in location-aware branded apps, tours, and treasure hunt games. They provide indoor and outdoor solutions for museums, tourism, retail stores, and events. Lately, Locatify and their CMS has been busy with Estimote beacons to put together two unique treasure hunt games for two distinct purposes.

In Denmark, the shopping mall Lyngby Storcentre has a branded app called “GeoTrail GO.” The indoor treasure hunt game provides an indoor map with seasonal holiday-themed treasure hunt games to encourage children to explore. Using the app, they find virtual treasures to earn points towards prizes from the toy store, and raffles to win even bigger! The payoff plays to both customers and shop owners alike: keeping children entertained via games and prizes, giving parents a bit more time and space to shop in peace, and allowing business owners to experience a boost in revenue.

Similarly, Science World in British Columbia created an indoor game using the Locatify SmartGuide app. Science World used Estimote beacons in conjunction with the app for their exhibit “Zoom into Nano,” which guides visitors into a deeper dive of nanotechnology: the science of working at an atomic level. With Zoom Into Nano, they used transparent images rather than color field maps in the application. This made the exhibits invisible in the app, and exploration of the space was essential in activating the content, further gamifying the experience. Visitors could use their phones to connect with the beacons, which would trigger content “finding an exhibit” that aren’t visible to the naked eye. Hence the name, “Zoom Into Nano”. Science World looked to encourage people to interact with exhibits in an innovative way. This was a clever method of using phones in a way that didn’t distract from the exhibits, but actually added value to key target audiences like teenagers.

“It has been a great experience working with GeoTrail Go and Science World to further develop and implement indoor treasure hunt games. Connecting our Creator CMS and outdoor treasure hunt game capability with beacons to migrate the hunt indoors has proved to be a great success for Locatify and our customers. Both games have been received positively and we are excited about applying similar innovative ideas to further projects.”-Sam Liddell with Locatify

Locatify presented their first indoor games using Estimote beacons last year at UT Messan, the information and technology conference in Reykjavik, Iceland. Since then, their customers have welcomed the opportunity to create a new layer of depth and interaction that engages their customers via games. Locatify is constantly working to advance their technology and CMS, with recent added features including a “submit a photo challenge.” Their CMS is available for use with Estimote beacons, and they’re always ready to collaborate with new customers. Check out Locatify for help with your next app!

Jess Anderson, Community Manager + Content Creator at Estimote

Our vision at Estimote is bold—to create an operating system for the physical world. A software environment that is easy to set up and allows anyone to quickly build and share apps, interacting with places, people, and nearby objects.

Since the inception of the company in 2012, we’ve been making steady, incremental progress and we’ve been innovating with many different elements of our stack. Last year wasn’t any different, and we again released a lot of amazing beacon tech innovations.

In this post we will summarize everything we have launched last year and give you a glimpse into what’s coming in 2017.

LOCATION BEACONS
In the beginning of 2016 we introduced Location Beacons—the most robust beacons on the market. More sensors, 1Mb of built-in memory, and battery life extended to 5+ years. We’ve also made it possible to simultaneously broadcast iBeacon or Eddystone packets, and telemetry data.

BLUETOOTH 5 READY BEACONS
Last year, we transitioned our beacon products to the newest Nordic nRF52 chip architecture. It’s not only faster and more power-efficient, but also compatible with the newest Bluetooth 5 standard. Bluetooth 5 will usher in an entirely more advanced era of connected devices.

INDOOR LOCATION IN BACKGROUND 
Our Indoor Location SDK has been updated with a new mode supporting background positioning. Users can be located in real-time on a floor plan even if they don’t have an app open.

ANALYTICS API
You can now add a tiny code snippet to your mobile apps to collect visits, dwell time, loyalty, and other data generated by users visiting your venues. This data is real-time and can be accessed via an API.

GENERAL-PURPOSE INPUT/OUTPUT (GPIO)
Location Beacons now have an interface which allows for connectivity of Bluetooth peripherals to other general purpose devices— for example, garage door manufacturers can now prototype directly with Location Beacons to open doors based on presence, or lighting manufacturers can turn on lights when someone is in range.

STICKERS SUPPORT PHYSICAL WEB
Sticker beacons that you can attach to a bike, dog or any other object gained a new feature—the possibility to advertise Physical Web URLs. Chrome browser users will be able to see these URLs and notifications even if they don’t have your app installed.

HERE AND NOW NOTIFICATIONS
Physical Web links can also be advertised by Location beacons using our “Here & Now” technology. Here & Now makes it easy to remotely manage URLs shown to users and collect campaign statistics such as number of visits, impressions, and clicks.

ESTIMOTE MONITORING
For beacon tech it is important to deliver notifications exactly when a user enters the desired zones. We have massively improved on the default Core Location enter/exit events with our own implementation of monitoring.

MIRROR, A VIDEO-ENABLED BEACON
Contextual notifications and personal content can now also be shown on large displays. In September we announced the world’s first video-enabled beacon. Your mobile apps can now cast content to TV screens nearby. We will start shipping the first dev kits soon, so be sure to pre-order today.

LOYALTY APP TEMPLATE
We also moved our developer-focus to the next level and offered our first ready-made app templates. These are nicely designed apps pre-configured for beacons you own. You can download the source code and start using them right away.

BEACON MEMORY
Every Location Beacon we have shipped has 1Mb of additional EEPROM memory built-in. We made this storage available for reading / writing of data to and from beacons via a simple key-value storage API. Welcome to the Fog Computing era!

SOFTWARE PRICING
In the past year we also matured as a company around go-to-market. The enterprise software we built for large deployments has been so successful we’ve decided to make it available for everyone through simplified SaaS plans. We have grandfathered all existing customers and also made the entire software stack free for developers to try.

CLUSTERED BEACONS CAN LAST FOREVER
A breakthrough in beacon lifetime also originated from us last year via a very elegant software solution—you can now put two or more beacons next to each other and form a logical beacon that will last as long as your application demands.

MESH NETWORKING
Beacons are tiny computers, so why not make them talk to each other like servers do? Last month we launched the world’s first truly low-power Bluetooth mesh networking. Beacons can now exchange firmware or configuration updates between each other, and still last for many years on batteries.

In 2017 you can expect the Estimote Team to continue to innovate and contribute to the Internet of Things space, invest a lot in beacons/sensors, and build out our indoor location stack.

We will continue to make it easier to build magical experiences in physical spaces. And we will integrate our products more tightly to enable seamless and surprising interactions.

To give you a better sense of what to expect, see our newest Location Beacons with UWB that we launched recently at CES 2017 in Las Vegas:

AUTO-MAPPING WITH UWB
By adding a new time-of-flight chip to our Location Beacons we’ve created a seamless auto-mapping solution. Just place beacons on the perimeter of your room and the exact floor plan will be created in Estimote Cloud, enabling precise indoor location.

Stay tuned for a new wave of contextual computing innovations and don’t forget to follow @Estimote on Twitter. Happy hacking and happy 2017!

Founders of Estimote, Inc

Beacons can help deliver context to the physical world seamlessly. They allow you to build intelligent mobile apps, and deliver relevant information for a specific place and time. We like to call it a “magical experience”. At Estimote, we believe the same magic should be applied to the beacon deployment and management process. Recently, we’ve announced breakthrough technologies such as a mesh network, Clustering and Automapping, all designed to take a step closer to intelligent beacon network configuration. Today we are proud to announce another step in this direction - firmware updates over mesh network.

A virtual team working for you

Keeping your beacons up-to-date is a no brainer. Just last year, we introduced 10 significant firmware updates. Features like Shake To Connect, Clustering and mesh improve the deployment process, shortening the time you need to put in personally. On the other hand, Estimote Storage API and Here&Now support enables completely new user experiences.

Over-The-Air firmware updates take about a minute on average, no matter if it’s performed using a mobile phone or beacon-to-beacon mesh network communication. Manual OTA firmware updates require some additional work, though. You need to physically move towards the beacon, detect the device, connect to it, and navigate the app UI to start the actual process. These additional steps make a single beacon firmware update much longer in practice.

Imagine a deployment consisting of 30 beacons. Manual firmware updates would take about 2.5 hours of time from a single maintenance worker. Even using some automations like the Estimote Bulk Updater will take about an hour.

Firmware updates over mesh represents a new level of efficiency. Each updated beacon is capable of updating another. This introduces an exponential increase in the process speed. An update of your 30 beacon fleet takes just 5 minutes total! It’s extraordinarily time saving, not to mention it cuts costs. You’d need a trained crew of 30 people to achieve similar results!

How it works

With this release, the beacon firmware is propagated throughout the entire mesh network automatically. To get the process started, just update a single meshed beacon using our regular Over-The-Air firmware update available in the iOS or Android Estimote App. When a new version of firmware is in place, the beacon starts scanning for other devices belonging to the same network. Once discovered, the initial beacon will automatically connect to another and perform the firmware update. The newly updated beacon becomes another source of new firmware, and propagates it further.

Information about the current firmware version is available in one of the Bluetooth packets broadcasted by a beacon. That means you don’t need to connect to the beacon to access this information! Confirmation of successful firmware propagation can be collected and sent to the Estimote Cloud with just a single walk-through of the venue.

Firmware updates over mesh do not require any additional development. Connect beacons into the mesh network using Estimote SDK or App, and that’s it! Just perform the firmware update on a single beacon, and the other ones will have the new version automatically. To use this new, amazing feature you just need Long Range Location Beacons running firmware 4.12 or higher, and use the Estimote SDK in versions 4.14 for iOS and 0.18 for Android.

Bottom line

Keeping your beacons up-to-date gives you access to all the innovations and improvements that we introduce. With firmware updates over mesh, you can achieve this easier than ever, saving both time and money. Transferring bigger chunks of data over mesh network enables even more sophisticated features in the future. Stay tuned! We have a lot to show you this year!

Got any questions or ideas to share? Let us know!

Marcin Klimek, Product Manager at Estimote

RedBull and clubbing. They go together like… well, like Redbull and clubbing! Haven’t you ever crushed a can of RedBull and proceeded to dance your face off to house music? But check it out: in an effort to explore the possibilities of club culture and its future, RedBull recently teamed up with fashion designer, Borre Akkersdiik, to create wristbands using Estimote Stickers. Together they organized a two night engagement during the Amsterdam Dance Event, centered around the concept of triggering all five senses.

Guests’ bracelet and wristbands (CC-BY Ayman on Flickr), RedBull Playrooms - Atrium (credits: RedBull Playrooms on Flickr)

To start, guests were given wristbands with Estimote Sticker PCBs embedded in them. Over the span of two nights, 900 Estimote stickers were deployed with these wristbands! Using the data generated by the wristbands, a team of scientists from Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica - CWI (the Dutch National Research Centre for Computer Science and Mathematics) were able to create algorithms and deep neural nets to understand guests’ movement within the spaces and energy levels throughout the night. The stickers were used for a wide variety of applications, even using the ambient temperature sensors within the Stickers to read when things were heating up!

The data collected was visualized by CLEVER°FRANKE into a psychedelic display of color and line, and presented to welcome new guests. What’s even cooler is how this data was then fed into the “Overdrive Room.” The Overdrive Room was designed with a contextual atmosphere in mind. Given the present energy level within the club, the room would respond with colorful light installations, scent diffusers, and a 4D sound system.

Overdrive Room (CC-BY Ayman on Flickr)

The data visualized stuck around for the after party! Beyond real-time presentation and environmental changes to the Overdrive Room, efforts were made to make this a truly memorable event. Guests’ individual data was summarized into personal take-home artifacts. This summary displayed their activity throughout the night, and how they moved from one room to another. Guests could view which songs made the crowd more energetic, as well as the three top songs that personally got them “flying”. Another final touch: a small selection of VIP guests were gifted a signature BYBORRE scarf with the event summary knitted into it. The scarf graphics were a direct result of the acquired data and the BYBORRE “Pixel to Needle” process.

Data to Scarf (credits: Julian Burford and Luke Smits - Parapluke on Instagram), Personal event summary artifact (credits: CLEVER°FRANKE)

“During this exploration, creative specialists and technology experts managed to create a futuristic clubbing experience. Throughout the two nights, with the help of technology, the club could listen to its inhabitants, alter its stimuli to suit their experience and trigger new interactions. In addition, it would seamlessly capture meaningful moments for them, to allow them to be in the moment and thus experience the night to its fullest.” - Pablo Cesar, group leader, Distributed and Interactive Systems

Plenty of specialists were a part of making this event a success. From data scientists and engineers, to designers, musicians, and party planners, the RedBull Playrooms were truly a collaborative group effort… a mix of art, technology, science, and data to create a one-of-a-kind experience. While it’s implausible to list every single person involved, be sure you check out the various players at their respective sites.

-BYBORRE -Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica -CLEVER°FRANKE -RedBull

Jess Anderson, Community Manager + Content Creator at Estimote