No doubt, you’ve heard of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. A multi-level structure designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the art museum takes in over a million visitors a year. But did you know that they’re also fully outfitted with Estimote beacons?

The Guggenheim Museum utilizes Estimote beacons throughout the structure to push proximate content to visitors. With the Guggenheim app, you’re free to wander the spiral ramps of the museum at your leisure, be it from the bottom toward the top or from the top toward the bottom, as intended by the architect himself. Armed with your phone and headphones, content is pushed to you depending on what artwork you are closest to. Want to know who painted it, what it’s called, or the story behind it? The Guggenheim app provides you with contextual information, and Estimote beacons surface this information as you walk through the space. The app includes everything from text, to images, to audio and video guides about both the Guggenheim structure itself and the artwork housed within. This enriching and educational participation is exactly what we have in mind when we think of magical experiences.

The Guggenheim museum initiated beacon-led content navigation in December 2015, when the Near Me feature was launched on the Guggenheim app. Over the course of 2016, use of the Near Me feature grew to exceed more traditional navigation paths, including screens for entering artwork wall numbers and browsing multimedia guide lists. By the end of 2016, the Near Me screen had been viewed twice as often as the wall number screen, and ten percent more frequently than guide list screens.

Based on the success of Near Me, the Guggenheim museum launched a second beacon-based feature in 2017. Messages responds to time as well as location at the Frank Lloyd Wright building, notifying visitors about events and opportunities over the course of their museum visit. Customized by the time of day, visit length, and building location, Messages aims to provide just the right amount of information at just the right time.

Making this magic happen wasn’t without its challenges, of course. There were hurdles along the way, and creative problem solving certainly came into play. For instance, how do you deploy beacons without causing a visual distraction from the art and architecture in the museum? The Guggenheim hid beacons from view by placing them in the lighting trays near the ceilings, or with customized white enclosures. This provides a clear signal with no physical barriers to the app, while being cleverly hidden from plain view.

How about making sure all Guggenheim visitors have access to this app, no matter if they’re on Android, iPhone, have a limited data plan, don’t know to turn on their Bluetooth, or perhaps don’t even speak English? The Guggenheim provides complimentary iPod touch devices and headphones, prepared with all the appropriate settings. There are even multiple languages built into the app. Users can learn more about the building, the Guggenheim collection, and select exhibitions in Italian, French, German, and Spanish.

Installing Estimote beacons in the Guggenheim’s iconic rotunda proved a special challenge. The building’s unique architecture amplified beacons beyond their expected range, bouncing Bluetooth signals off the rotunda skylight and making them accessible across the ramps. Certain wall materials built for specific exhibitions proved too lightweight to block beacon signals, creating bleed between different gallery spaces. The Guggenheim museum developed a system for identifying and reshaping beacon signals to accommodate building architecture, allowing a beacon-led experience customized to building galleries.

The Guggenheim has put together an exceptionally successful use case with Estimote beacons, engaging with their visitors in an accessible and educational format. For more information or to check out the latest exhibits, be sure to visit the Guggenheim’s website. And be sure to experience the magic in person, next time you’re in New York City!

Jess Anderson, Community Manager + Content Creator

Ever shop at a Tesco? If you live in Asia or Europe, it’s more than likely you’re familiar with it! After all, Tesco is the third largest retailer in the world: a major grocery store chain with branches in 12 countries. And guess what? Tesco Lotus stores all across Thailand are fully outfitted with Estimote beacons!

The use of their beacon enabled app is beautiful in its simplicity: you walk around the store, and you’re sent discounts, coupons, and special promotions. The presentation is what makes it so unique… it’s a hunt for a great deal, and who doesn’t like free money? You never know where you’ll be when you receive an offer, or even what kind of deal is coming your way.

The offers are beneficial for everyone involved. For Tesco Lotus, utilizing this fresh and innovative technology incentivizes shopping with them, and encourages repeat business. The more their customers visit their stores, the more deals they get, building brand loyalty and cementing Tesco’s position as one of the foremost retailers in the world. Not to mention the sassy reputation they build with those colorful ads! From the customer perspective, not only are you getting a great deal on your pretzel, coffee, or groceries, you become part of a magical experience, engaging with your surroundings and having fun along the way. The app includes other cool features like finding the store closest to you, saving your card information, and managing deliveries. It’s an all inclusive solution that takes care of Tesco Lotus customers from end to end. When was the last time grocery shopping made you smile this much?

Our beacons are opt-in only technology out of respect for user privacy. The app needs to first convince users that sharing their location, turning on their Bluetooth, and downloading the app will give them something awesome in return. There’s some workarounds we offer here at Estimote with Here&Now and Eddystone URL to branch out of the app, but ultimately it’s in our business partner’s hands to encourage their users to opt-in and turn that Bluetooth signal on! Tesco Lotus has found a unique way to do that with their ad campaigns, showing all their users how to prepare themselves for the rewards that lay ahead. They present their app as a playful and beneficial tool for enhancing future adventures to Tesco Lotus, and are completely transparent in how it all works. By encouraging their visitors with rewards and treasure hunting, they’re maximizing the full potential of their app and user experience. Plus, who would pass up the opportunity to encounter a beacon-deploying ninja in cargo pants?

Aforementioned ninjas deploying Estimote beacons

If you’ve ever seen one of the Tesco Lotus viral beacon ads, you already know all about the hype built around beacons. If you haven’t, you’re definitely missing out! Make sure you watch their YouTube clips here, here, and here. And if you ever find yourself in Thailand, check it out at one of their 1,700 stores!

For more info, visit Tesco Lotus and 3DS Interactive

Jess Anderson, Content Creator + Community Manager

We’re getting closer to ship the first dev kits of Mirror, the world’s first video beacon, and we want to take this opportunity to start introducing you to the Mirror technology.

In this post, we’ll give you a sneak-peek of how Mirror works and the philosophy behind some of that. Most importantly though, you’ll learn what all of this means for building first Mirror-powered experiences!

Some of the things we mention in this post are still work in progress and might change—but it should still give you a general idea of where it’s all headed!

Sourcing the context for the smart screen

Our mission for Estimote Mirror is to turn screens into smart “assistants”, showing personalized content based on who’s nearby, where they are, what objects they’re interacting with, etc. To make this possible, something needs to feed Mirror with that data.

This is why, much like with regular beacons, the smartphone and the mobile app are still at the heart of it all.

  Your airline app knows where you’re flying to.
  Your shopping list app knows what products you’re looking for.
  Your running app knows whether you’re a marathoner or sprinter.

This makes it possible to

  highlight your flight info at the airport screen,
  direct you to the right aisle from the supermarket’s screen,
  or suggest the right shoes for you right there at a screen in a sportswear store.

You don’t have to pull the smartphone out of your pocket, but it’s still silently doing the job of making sure you’re shown just the right information.

This is why, when your Mirror dev kit arrives, it’ll be coming with iOS and Android SDKs.

Side note: we also have other sources of context in mind for Mirror. If you’ve seen our Mirror video, you know that it can also interact with Estimote Stickers. We’re REALLY excited about this, and we’ll be covering that in a separate post in the future.

Mobile Mirror SDK, your “remote” for Mirror

The mobile SDKs for Mirror are about more than just feeding Mirror with user data. In fact, they’re in full control of what to show on Mirror:

When the user comes near the screen, the mobile Mirror SDK will establish a Bluetooth link between the smartphone and the Mirror, and tell it to display the view however you programmed it (uploading the assets if necessary).

There’s no need to upload any “Mirror apps” to the Mirror itself—your mobile app is the ultimate remote for Mirror.

A sneak-peek at one of our Mirror demos!

This makes it easy to get started: just drop some code into your mobile app, the way you always do—Swift, Java, Obj-C, Kotlin, your call. Iterating? Submit a new version of your app to the app store. The next time the user comes in range of Mirror, they’ll immediately see the updated experience. You could have a thousand Mirrors deployed in locations with no WiFi, and yes, all it takes is distributing an updated version of your mobile app—a problem already solved by iOS and Android.

Built-in views, custom views

At the heart of developing for Mirror are the Mirror views (e.g., the TextView shown above), so let’s also talk about that for a moment.

Mirror uses a subset of HTML5 and CSS3 to render its UI, and the Mirror views are ready-made pieces of HTML that are stored on the Mirror’s flash drive. The mobile SDK can then invoke any of these views when in range of Mirror, filling the blanks in.

Much like iOS or Android’s collection of built-in components (UITableView, ListView, etc.), we’ll be baking our own collection into the Mirror OS itself: text view, table view, image view, etc. We’re spending a lot of time fine-tuning them to work great on the big screen, so that you don’t have to. However, we are also making sure these views are extremely customizable. Colors, backgrounds, fonts, image on the left or on the right, these things are up to you.

Finally, you can always build and upload your own, hand-crafted, custom views to Mirror. Write some HTML/CSS/JS, test in a regular web browser, add a few placeholders to be filled in later by the mobile app, deploy to Mirror. Front-end web developers should feel at home!

Thoughts?

We hope you enjoyed this preview into what developing for Mirror looks like—we certainly are excited to be sharing it with you. Let us know what you think on our forums, or by dropping us a note to contact@estimote.com. We’re eager to hear your feedback!

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

Piotr Krawiec, Head of Developer Experience at Estimote

Need beacons? Need them, like… right now? Well, we’ve got some pretty exciting news: we’re testing out a new shipping method to go from 4 days to 2 hours. Wowza!

Not to brag, but we’re already pretty proud of our shipping time. With the exception of our preorders and maybe that one other time, we typically get our beacons shipped out immediately. We use the fastest shipping option available via UPS, and for our clients within Europe or the US, that means arriving in about 3-4 days on average. Starting this week, we’ve launched a pilot program to immediately ship beacons to our users, with a 2 hour or less wait time. 

Here’s the deal. For our first city, we’re testing it in London. So if you’re in London and you order Location or Proximity beacons on weekdays between 8am-4pm, you’ll get your beacons in 2 hours or less. It’s that easy. No extra fees, no fine print.

Ok, so if you really want the fine print: We’ll ship to any address. Pricing is all calculated upon checkout. If your order comes through after the hours of our courier, it will go through our normal shipping flow and arrive in the standard 3-4 days. Beacons shipped in 2 hours will arrive with an activation code, make sure you save the box! As of this article being published, our courier is supplied with Location beacons. Within a few short days, Proximity beacons will be added to the flow.

And what’s next? Well, more cities, more testing! Keep an eye out for the next city on our agenda. We’re feeling San Francisco or Miami. And in the meantime, don’t forget we have offices in Kraków and Manhattan! If you need beacons fast, reach us at contact@estimote.com, we’ll do our best to set you up.

Ever since we launched Indoor Location, we’ve received lots of questions from you, our loyal clients and developers. You contacted us with some fantastic use cases, many of which were very successful. Good job, everyone! Regardless of what that was, you had to map the space out first, no exceptions. So far it involved either wandering around the spaces and doing the measurements yourself or creating the floor plan with our SDK. Those days might be over for some of you.

Although approaching beacons one by one might be quite a fun thing to do, and we could all stand to get some more exercise in, we wondered if we can make the whole process smoother that’s how Location Beacons with UWB were born.

They include an automapping feature, which allows beacons to communicate with one another and map the spaces quickly. This effectively saves you a lot of time which you can then use to enhance the visitors’ experience. You want your positioning to be as precise as possible and with UWB beacons, the floor plan will be a faithful reflection of your actual space and where the beacons are installed (down to a few inches!).

So let’s quickly go through some of the most common topics involving Indoor Location. There’s nothing worse than getting excited about a new product, only to realize it won’t be the right fit for you. We want to be very transparent with what can and can’t be done with our technology. So if there’s anything troubling you, feel free to post below and we’ll jump right in!

What is Estimote Indoor Location?

Estimote Indoor Location is software for the positioning of people and objects down to a few meters. With the Indoor Location app and Indoor Location SDK, developers can easily set up interactive locations and incorporate them into apps. Those interactive locations can then be used to give customers a truly personalized experience, to enrich their visits and offer products or services suitable for their current location. When a GPS signal gets lost in indoor spaces, that’s when Indoor Location steps in!

How do I get started?

First of all, get one set of Location Beacons with UWB and an iOS device as well as find a small space to test the beacons first. Once they arrive, get the Estimote Indoor Location App from the App Store and place them on the walls at your eye-level, according to the app’s instructions. You’re done for now, grab a coffee and wait till the beacons create a detailed floor plan of your space to the cloud. You’re now ready to start developing. If you’re planning a larger deployment, we’ll be launching our Deployment App soon as well to help you utilize the automapping feature.

UWB Beacons will automatically create a floor plan for you with an inch-level precision, but if you already have 4 or more non-UWB Location Beacons lying around somewhere, you can use them for Indoor Location too. The very same Estimote Indoor Location app will help you create a rough map of a small space to test in. If you’re planning a larger deployment, we recommend creating locations with our SDK for the best accuracy.

Can I use Proximity Beacons or Stickers to map the spaces?

Unfortunately, no. Only Location Beacons and Location Beacons with UWB are capable of mapping locations in Indoor Location. You can, however, use other devices to enhance your user’s experience by offering proximity notifications or ability to “track objects“. For more details on what Proximity and Locations can do, please check this article.

What’s the difference between Location Beacons and Location Beacons with UWB?

Location Beacons with UWB are the latest iteration of our most popular beacons. They feature the very same features and specifications as Location beacons, but on top of that they allow for beacons to very precisely measure distances between each other and use this info to automatically create a detailed floor plan, saving you a lot of time! You’ll see the difference, especially in large spaces where instead of spending several days coding your space, you’ll simply place the beacons on the walls and let them do the work for you. You can find some more details about Automapping in this article and in the video below:

We ship Location Beacons in development kits of 3 for $99, while Location Beacons with UWB are currently available for pre-order at $159 for a devkit of 4.

Is Indoor Location available for iOS and Android?

For now (Spring 2017), Indoor Location SDK is available for iOS mobile devices only. An Android version is definitely on our roadmap, and we’ll proceed to develop it.

The main reason why it wasn’t developed simultaneously for both platforms is that every Android device is different, and they use different Bluetooth antennas. Indoor Location is based on complex algorithms that take into account the antenna’s position, quality, and orientation. There are also differences in Bluetooth support across all the devices and versions of Android. It takes a lot of time to develop such a complex tool like Indoor Location SDK for hundreds of popular devices running Android. That’s why in the beginning, we focused on an iOS environment.

Our Proximity SDK is, however, available for both platforms. It means you can use many of the very similar features also on Android. You can develop fantastic Android apps capable of detecting where beacons and stickers are and have your app act on that knowledge, e.g. push content to users based on their location or record the history of their visits and react to this.

Do you provide SDK for Indoor Location?

Yes, it’s available for iOS and you can check it out on our GitHub.

How many beacons do I need?

For small spaces you will need at least 2 development kits (6 beacons) to get started, or 1 UWB kit. The exact amount of beacons you will need depends on the size of the space but also factors such as positions of the walls, furniture, number of people and BLE devices in the space etc. Please see the table below for the approximate area you’ll be able to cover. If you need more detailed estimation, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at any time.

How accurate is Indoor Location?

The exact precision will depend on a lot of factors, such as the shape and size of your space, furniture, number of people and Bluetooth-enabled devices and so on. On average though, you should be able to get the precision down to 2 meters (6,5 feet) which will work great for most of deployments. This will allow you to easily detect when visitors approach specific locations and effectively guide them to their (or your! ;-)) points of interest. You’ll be also able to effectively analyze user traffic and make informed decisions based on it.

If you’re not sure about the accuracy needed in your particular use case, we recommend that you get 2 devkits and test it for yourself. You’ll be surprised by how much you can achieve!

Do you have any use cases of Indoor Location?

Absolutely. Here are several use cases we’ve documented on our blog:

Volcano theme park implements indoor navigation

Roomaps uses Estimote Beacons to provide indoor location for Daimler’s future-dealership

EXPO 2016 Antalya uses Estimote Beacons in one of the world’s largest microlocation projects

Are there any fees associated with using Indoor Location?

If you’re using anywhere up to 20 devices, you can use all the features of our Cloud including Indoor Location, without any fees, forever. This includes analytics of your beacons’ usage as well as the ability to view your floor plans in the Cloud. If you have more than 20 devices, either beacons or Stickers, we will set you up with one of our paid plans to continue using Indoor Location, as well as take advantage of all the other features such as Fleet Management, Here & Now, and Analytics.

How can Indoor Location be used in airports?

Indoor Location can be used to help your customers navigate around the airports. You could allow them to scan their boarding pass, and the app would determine their current position, guiding them straight to the gate. You could also mark useful places on their in-app map, such as toilets, duty-free stores, or information points. Using beacons, you could also display custom notifications as they pass by shops or restaurants, offering them discounts or the daily special.

How can Indoor Location be used in museums?

If you were to integrate Indoor Location into a museum’s app, you could help visitors easily navigate around the whole venue. It will be most useful in large museums where you have to cross multiple rooms and corridors to find a particular piece of art or exhibit. With an app utilizing integrated Indoor Location, visitors can just type the name of a painting or sculpture and the app will display the best way to get there, working just like GPS but with more precision, and indoors! Just like the case of airports, you could also include a quick way to locate most common utilities, such as toilets or cash desks. You could also analyze user movements, and build new exhibitions based on their footprints and popular routes.

How can Indoor Location be used in stores and shopping malls?

Indoor Location should be particularly helpful in large stores and shopping malls, where visitors often get lost or confused about which department offers a specific product. With an app using Indoor Location, they could simply type the product name or type, and starting from their location, the app would guide them quickly to the specific place. It could also display promotions from other stores as they pass by. Through your Cloud account, you could also analyze the most frequently visited places, and plan your visual merchandising around actual statistical data.

Can I track where users of my app are at any given moment?

Yes, it can be implemented into your app. Keep in mind, though, that user will have to specifically allow for his/her location to be shared with you in order for you to see their location in real time and analyze the traffic. We don’t recommend tracking users’ location in the background too as it will require additional permissions and probably won’t bring any value to users.

Do you offer help with the deployment of beacons?

We offer support over email as you build your prototype or start a deployment. If you’re planning a large deployment with hundreds of beacons, we will certainly offer dedicated support and may even fly out to help you successfully deploy beacons… we have historically done this for some of our enterprise level clients. We’re also happy to analyze any use cases you can think of, simply let us know and one of our team members will jump right in!

Will Indoor Location also work in outdoor use cases?

To work properly, Indoor Location requires beacons to be placed on flat walls, and was built with indoor spaces in mind. Beacons are splashproof but not waterproof, so they could be damaged during rainfall or in extreme temperatures. That’s why we recommend using them indoor only for the best experience.

I want to track users wearing custom wristbands in a specific location, is it possible with Indoor Location?

Although we don’t produce wristbands of any kind, anything is possible to develop! We’re here to guide you towards possibilities, partners, and even potential developers, and offer the tools to make it all happen. You may have read about a collaborative project sponsored by RedBull, who teamed up with a popular fashion designer to create wristbands using PCBs from our Stickers. They were then distributed among hundreds of attendants and allowed for some pretty amazing things to be discovered. Check this story on our blog.

Piotr Małek, Community Manager @ Estimote.

Beacon technology is maturing. Our team at Estimote is seeing more and more deployments using 1,000+ beacons. Projects like Qatar Airways and ZenCity are great examples. But this level of scale brings new categories of challenges. Device identification, settings propagation, or keeping the firmware up-to-date are just a few of them. Managing your beacon network manually becomes very problematic and cost ineffective. That is why we are investing more time and energy into preparing tools and technologies that make beacon management a breeze. Today, we’d like to announce some great improvements to both remote fleet management and mesh networking.

The command hub for your remote fleet management is the Estimote Cloud dashboard. We believe a centralized interface like this is the best way to manage large deployments of beacons. Lots of screen real estate, superior visualization capabilities, and the ability to access it from anywhere make it a perfect choice. Beacons don’t have direct internet connectivity just yet. The fact that you need to physically be on the spot to apply your desired settings via Bluetooth is still the main obstacle here.

Mesh and remote fleet management are the perfect match

We’ve recently introduced mesh capabilities, which let beacons talk directly to each other. Apply settings or update firmware on just a single Mesh-enabled beacon, and the rest will get the same update almost instantly. That minimizes the time you need to spend on location, propagating the Cloud’s data to beacons, from hours to minutes.

Mesh networking is perfectly supplemented by Estimote remote fleet management. It makes it much faster to perform the initial configuration of Mesh. Instead of manually connecting to each device, you can just place your phone next to the beacons and the remote management feature will configure them automatically. It can also be used to connect to one of the Mesh beacons to trigger network communication and settings sharing between them. As it’s constantly working in both the foreground and background, you can make it a function of every app — it’s a part of our SDK.

Bulk Updater - a time saver for huge deployments

This is where our new developments come into play. The recent update of the Estimote SDK introduced great improvements to remote fleet management. The Bulk Updater function— a core part of fleet management on mobile phones — was completely rewritten. The original implementation needed a fair amount of time to handle bigger deployments, and the new one has no limitation. It’s doesn’t matter if you have 3 or 3,000 beacons — it will always work as intended. You also have much more control over the way it works. You can configure how often new information is fetched from the Cloud. You can define the timeout period of the operation, if you want to make sure it doesn’t run for too long. You can also intentionally skip automatic firmware updates, to make it quicker to apply settings.

Deployment App - remote fleet management without coding

We’ve shipped an update to the Deployment App, delivering remote fleet management functionality out of the box. The new addition — a Remote Fleet Management section — provides a convenient way to apply cloud-defined configurations to your beacons without the need for dabbling in code at all. It will keep your beacons up to date thanks to the bulk firmware update option, too. And the cherry on top? You have complete insight into and control over the update progress. Keep your beacons synchronized, while saving a lot of time — and by extension, money — consumed by manual configuration.

In effect, we’ve brought down the time needed to update an entire bulk bag of beacons — you just need 3 minutes to update the settings on 25 beacons, or 15 minutes, if you want to also update their firmware along the way. That’s well under a minute for each beacon, and basically all you need to do is hit “Start.”

We’ve improved the center of command itself along the away. The Cloud interface now includes proper paging for accounts with plenty of beacons. The search engine is now boosted, too — it supports more fields, and is blazing fast with a 10x faster response time. We are also constantly enhancing our GUI support for Mesh networking, so you don’t need to use API to work with it.

Download the Deployment App from the App Store today. If you want to look under the hood, check out our SDK for iOS and Android, or simply download the app template. Once you have that ready, there’s a tutorial waiting to guide you through, including remote fleet management in your own app.

Marcin Klimek, Product Manager at Estimote

Rafał Ociepa, Community Manager at Estimote

Imagine - you’re in a closed, compact space. You navigate around it, slowly moving your feet as if you were exploring an unfamiliar area. As you approach the walls, you start hearing sounds. Every corner is different and a completely new experience is always a few steps away. You hear people chatting, kids laughing, trucks speeding. Kids again, a lot of kids. And then you land at a distinguished ceremony, right in time for the applause and ovation. You gently close your eyes as you approach the sound and feel as though you are a part of each story.

As familiar as it might sound, this story has nothing to do with the latest VR headset from Oculus or Samsung. It’s a story of The Wall - the iconic installation that was displayed in Istanbul, Turkey earlier this year. It was built by Mr. Sinan Bokesoy / sonicPlanet at the Sanatorium art gallery. SonicPlanet specializes in creating interactive sound installations which run on mobile platforms, both indoors and outdoors.

The unusual exhibition consisted of two parts. As you entered the building, the “Gardens” installation would activate. There were no grass or trees in there, only 2 isolated spaces, limited merely by walls and your own imagination. As you wandered around the space, different kinds of experiences would await you every few steps. On one side, it would be an aristocratic garden party behind a one side wall. On another, a refugee camp with trucks and kids playing around. Such drastically different experiences, just a short distance away.

You would proceed down the stairs to the second part of the exhibition - The Proximity. There, you suddenly land in a war zone from 2,000 years ago, surrounded from every angle by the fight and tears as the soldiers try to bring down an imaginary wall. As you approached to the wall, the experience would get more and more intense. If you closed your eyes, you could feel completely immersed in the middle of it, with no way out. However, on the other side of the wall inside the exhibition space, you would land in a post-nuclear zone, filled with emptiness. What once was a lively, vibrant area would now be gone for good.

The Wall installation used Estimote iOS SDK with hidden Proximity Beacons placed around the spaces, each providing a completely different 3D sound experience. The exact sound to be played would be determined by the distance from the beacon as well as the device’s position. Visitors would grab an iPhone or iPad, download the SonicPlanet iOS app and put on the earphones to get started. As they proceeded around the exhibition, new soundscapes would await.

Although the installation is complete and finished, Mr Bokesoy plans to display it in several more venues later this year. We’ll update this article once we have some more precise dates. For more information on SonicPlanet and their projects, be sure to follow them at https://www.sonicplanet.com/& http://www.sanatorium.com.tr/en

Piotr Małek, Community Manager at Estimote

Silicon Valley tech companies often brag about changing the world. We all want to think we’re here for some benevolent purpose; It’s how we bring meaning to our lives and how we sleep with ourselves at night after a restless day of staring at code, talking to computers and PCBs, building out SDKs, and debating an internal procedure or company structure on Slack. And just like you, we at Estimote are guilty of that pie-in-the-sky dream, too! We’re constantly innovating and improving hardware and software solutions for developers to build their ideas out, and help ‘build an operating system for the physical world.’ While we do focus on products that help companies improve their bottom line (Mirror beacons shipping soon!) we occasionally have the opportunity to help our customers mold the physical world into a more friendly, manageable and self-sufficient place for people with disabilities. And hey, that’s pretty dang cool!

We’re pretty wild about this type of use case; it’s a big freaking deal! We’re helping people help themselves. To be a part of this solution, to have our beacon technology improve the quality of life for a child with autism, or a person unable to see and navigate a school campus, or help patients communicate pain location… well, it’s enough to bring tears to our eyes, and inspires us to continue pushing forward. Here are just a few of the companies that have recently worked out a solution for people with mental, physical, or developmental disabilities.

Right-Hear

Have you ever wondered how a blind person navigates around a mall, a university, or any other public space? This is exactly the problem that Right-Hear is addressing. Right-Hear is an advanced accessibility solution that allows people who are blind or visually impaired to acquire better orientation in public spaces (mostly indoor). They like to think of themselves as the “ramp for the blind”… and their clients are anyone that needs help building out better access for all people, regardless of their vision or sense of direction. Imagine you are on a university campus. The Right-Hear app will guide you along with audio guides, letting you know when to turn right or left, telling you how many steps you are about to walk down, and even providing a button to call for extra help. By providing an app, with strategically placed beacons in the appropriate space, Right-Hear is giving their users a newfound sense of independence: they offer a helpful hand, but are opening up the world to explore safely, and naturally.

Better than explaining it, we can allow their promotional video to speak for itself:

We asked Right-Hear about integrating beacons into their app. Gil Elgrably, CTO of Right-Hear, answered: “This may sound surprising but starting with beacons is pretty straightforward. Once you understand the basic mechanism you can already build a location contextual app. The challenge starts when you want to optimize the technology capabilities to your own needs and use case. i.e the amount of beacons needed for the project, the best spot to hang them, the optimal configurations and of course the understanding what’s possible and what’s simply not. Our constant challenge is to keep evolving with the technology, new capabilities are available every several weeks and we are always looking to adopt them in order to build a better product.

We utilized Estimote SDK from day one for one simple reason - focus. As a growing startup, time is our most vital resource. We stay focused on improving our main value and what we do best - building the most advanced accessibility solution for people with orientation disabilities. We let others offer their “best value” and simply use their services. Fleet Management, Pre-configuration, Here&Now, and Security are just a few examples of Estimote platform features that we constantly use, and don’t have the need or time to develop and maintain ourselves.”

Right-Hear’s solution is very popular in their main hub of Israel, with over 100 venues already installed, such as: Azrieli, The Open University, Ra'anana Municipality, Weizmann Institute of Science, and many more. With over 1000 accessibility spots rolled out worldwide and containing Estimote beacons, native iOS and Android apps already up and running for free, and with a growing number of users, their vision to make the world more accessible for people with orientation challenges is closer than ever before.

SuperSpeak

The company Superplus was founded with a single mission: to improve the lives of children with special needs. Millions of children worldwide lack the ability to speak and communicate with their loved ones, either from developmental disabilities or neurological disorders. The app SuperSpeak is a communications tool allowing these children to express their emotions and needs through the use of photos and sounds from their own environment.

Understandably, it’s very frustrating for these children who often have challenges cognitively, to quickly and effortlessly find the right words and phrases to communicate what they need, when they need it. By combining the context and location awareness of Estimote beacons with their predictive AI, they are able to quickly find the words that are suitable for a child’s specific situation. For example, when a child is at home getting ready for school and goes into the kitchen for breakfast, SuperSpeak detects the beacon in the location of the kitchen, then offers the vocabulary for that environment and that specific situation. The child gets quick and easy access to the vocabulary needed to communicate what it relevant in that time and place. Now the child gets to request what they would like for breakfast, like Cheerios, apple, and orange juice.

Superspeak uses the Estimote iOS and Android SDKs in addition to our Cloud for managing the beacons. In the future, they hope to integrate Indoor Location SDK to provide even further context from the children’s environment. Additionally, Superspeak utilizes GPS and WiFi to combine various sources of location information in order to provide the fullest context possible for the user experience. Since the SDKs and beacons are easy to integrate, the challenge was mostly in how to solve the user experience, making sure it was user friendly to implement the tech and features at home and schools.

“We had a great time testing out the solution and making use of it in our daily lives. It is important for us to really understand both the users needs and our how our own features work out in the wild. In our families, we often try to only use our app for communication so that we can empathize with our users as much as possible. You can imagine the interesting situations when the team would only speak through the app at home… eating dinner takes on a whole new dimension! And, it is quite rewarding to see that it actually works!” - Kim Daniel Arthur, Superplus

MND Communicate

Our last example does not yet fully implement Estimote beacons, although it’s near and dear to our hearts. Doug Livingstone is a retired Computer Systems Engineer that reached out to Estimote back in October of 2016. He lost his dear wife and best friend Kathy to Motor Neurone Disease (MND) in 2012, and has dedicated his time since building solutions to assist with people suffering from diseases like ALS, MND, and more. He’s founded his project out of this tragedy, called simply MiND Communicate. He’s clear in his mission: he’s not in it to make money, he’s in it to make the world a better, more friendly place. His goal is to help patients with difficulties or inabilities to speak or move, assisting with communicating more effectively through the use of technology. At his core, Doug is a curious and playful hacker who stumbled across Estimote beacons, and has kept us updated on his progress ever since!

When Doug first wrote to us, he was curious in creating an app in navigating a robotic wheelchair using our Location beacons, geofencing technology, and Indoor Location services. This project is still on his roadmap. These days however, he’s put his wheelchair project aside for a moment while he’s launched his first prototype, called simply, the BodyPointer.

The prototype application has 6 screens, and is aimed at medical professionals and caretakers to play with and provide feedback… a kind of electronic brainstorming. Five of the screens are variants of what a user might see. BodyPointer allows a user to look at a body chart on a computer or tablet, and identify problems by selecting Pain, Discomfort, Hot, Cold, Itchy, Pins & Needles, and whether the problem is low, medium or high intensity. Then, the patient can look at the specific body area on the diagram, which will drop a suitably coloured marker on that spot. Doug is currently using a Tobii Eye-Tracker 4C unit (used for computer gaming) to make this work. In the real world, the current process for this involves a nurse holding up a chart, pointing to it, and asking questions while waiting for an eye-blink response, an exercise that could take 10-30 minutes per problem. With the BodyPointer, this process can take seconds rather than minutes, helping to relieve the person of their pain that much sooner.

In Doug’s own words: “I want to share my developments with interested parties to develop further and to cover everyone’s backside, I would provide a licence to use my IP so that there are no [legal] challenges. My only request would be the inclusion of a sentence in support documentation for whatever applications developed and distributed based on my ideas, ‘Dedicated to Mary Kathleen Klein (1951-2012), the inspiration for this product’.”

For now, Doug is working hard on his solutions, and leaving the prototypes open to the public on his website the moment they are ready to use and test. He’s involving himself with the MND and ALS communities, speaking to support groups, medical professionals, professors and researchers, and hopes by sharing his dreams and tests, he can inspire the next generation of engineers and developers to work towards building out these solutions in partnership with his own.

To be continued…

We often receive messages from customers interested in apps to assist with vision impairment, hearing impediments, asset tracking of medical equipment in hospitals… the list goes on. There can never be enough beacon-enabled tech out there to address all of the disabilities affecting our family and friends. This use case is all about tapping into humanity, and making the world a more hospitable environment, and we encourage all of our users out there to continue striving to build out these solutions. We’re here for support, guidance, questions, and of course, all of the tools you need to make this dream come to life, so that everyone may have a magical experience regardless of their physical afflictions. Keep at it, and don’t forget to reach out to us with your ideas.

Written by Jess Anderson, Content Creator @ Estimote

Want to know more about the use cases listed? Reach out!
Right-Hear
Superplus and Superspeak
MiND Communicate

Here at Estimote, we offer the hardware and software tools to build contextual solutions: an operating system for the physical world. We always encourage our users to dream big, that their imagination is the only limit. With our SDK, Cloud, Indoor Location, Here&Now, Fleet Management tools, app templates, and the knowledge of our community of developers (100K and going strong!), we have all the know-how and structure for creative entrepreneurs to pick up our tech and dive in, head first. Estimote wants nothing more than for our users to think creatively about their best use case, and with our toolkit and guidance, build that solution and implement it into the real world!

Certain companies have ran with the technology to build a solution for an entirely unique vertical. One of these companies in particular is Cuseum: a Boston based start-up that’s completely evangelized museums and tech, delivering everything a museum needs to usher their institution into the digital age, with supporting apps and contextual content. I sat down with Brendan Ciecko, Founder and CEO of Cuseum, to learn more about their platform, how they scale, what their challenges are, and when they know their work is complete.

JA: You’re an early supporter of Estimote, I know that we’re frequent partners and have collaborated in multiple scenarios! I suppose it’d be great to hear, in your own words, about Cuseum’s mission. What services are you providing for customers?

BC: Cuseum’s mission is to help museums, public attractions, and cultural nonprofits drive visitor and member engagement and success using mobile. We provide a suite of tools geared towards enhancing on-site experience, focusing on what we call the “digital docent” or companion guide. Our goal is to make it possible for museums to produce powerful mobile apps quickly, easily, and without breaking the bank. Over 100 organizations around the globe have used our platform to launch mobile apps, many of which use beacons from Estimote!

We provide our museum partners with a full solution – not just content management software, native mobile apps, or mobile web apps. We bring guidance, advice, and years of expertise to every organization we work with to ensure their new digital tools launch successfully and continue to thrive.

And, hot off the presses, we recently launched a new product to help organizations save time and money while boosting convenience for members – by replacing physical, plastic cards with digital membership cards. Beacons play a role in this as well!

JA: Cool! Can you share the role beacons play here? Do you use our NFC chip?

BC: Absolutely! Museums offer incredible benefits to their members, yet many of these valuable perks are often underutilized or unused. Imagine, as you walk by the museum’s cafe, store, or lecture hall, you’re reminded of your membership benefits and discounts. There’s untapped value and convenience for the member as well as a clear, turn-key, financial benefits for the museum. All of this is possible with our digital membership cards – no app download required!

JA: How much customization needs to be done for specific museums?

BC: The apps are completely white-labeled and styled to reflect each museum’s unique brand. We handle all of that heavy-lifting. Through the content management system, the museum also has the ability to configure most major aspects of the app. The overall interface is intended to be simple and “chromeless,” but we’re always happy to discuss additional customization if needed!

JA: What’s your beacon density like: how many beacons do you find needing for each museum? What’s the most amount of beacons you’ve ever installed in one museum, and can you tell us which museum it was?

BC: This varies greatly across the board! On one end, we have some museum partners who have as few as 1 beacon for a basic “welcome” and “thank you for visiting” notification. Generally, we recommend at-least 3 beacons to give each institution the opportunity to experiment in a low-risk, real-world environment. It’s always beneficial, and a great learning opportunity, to see things in action! We encourage an agile approach and have written up some suggestions on the topic.

On the other side of the spectrum, we’re working with a museum that will install 150 beacons! We’ll be sure to let you know when they launch, and will have much to share about that experience.

JA: Who are some of your clients? We’d love to be able to point our developers and users in that direction to test out the tech!

BC: Every month, we’re pleased to work with several new institutions, so the list keeps growing! Here’s a quick list of 5: - Museum of Fine Arts Houston - North Carolina Museum of Art - MCA Denver - Asian Art Museum - Musée McCord

You can also find a list of a few more apps on our website!

JA: I love that what you’re offering isn’t just an app, it isn’t just a platform, it’s the whole solution from end to end. It’s quite unique! You approach a museum and say, “Hey, we have the tools, knowledge, even the hardware access to bring your institution into the year 2017. Want some help? We’ll make it happen for you.”

BC: Thanks! We’re here to help museums in any way we can.

JA: What kind of tools do you use to make all this magic happen? Do you utilize Estimote SDK, Cloud, fleet management, Indoor Location? Do you use other sources? Are you building your own?

BC: We’ve built our platform from the ground up and use an array of tools to ensure the highest quality, performance, and efficiency.

For aspects related to monitoring and performance, we use Fabric, Sentry, LogEntries, New Relic. For analytics, we use Mixpanel and Google Analytics. For testing, Rspec and Quick/Nimble. For design, we use Sketch and for prototyping, UXPin… the list goes on!

In the name of reliability and performance, we don’t use third-rate hybrid platforms. Cuseum-powered native iOS apps, are completely native.

Although our platform is beacon agnostic, we find ourselves frequently using Estimote beacons. In those cases, we leverage Estimote’s SDK and Cloud. Outside of that, we’ve developed a few methods (such as smoothing algorithms) to improve the accuracy of beacon-triggered notifications.

JA: What’s the biggest challenge to make your projects beacon enabled, and come to fruition?

BC: When you’re adding an extra layer to digital projects which involves additional attention to user experience as well as supporting and managing expectations related to hardware - it adds more complexity and time to the launch schedule. For some of our museum partners, we recommend that they first soft launch their mobile app without beacons, and then iterate forward to add them to the equation. You need to “crawl before you walk, walk before you run” as they say! Whether it’s with 1 beacon or 100, we provide resources and guidance for our museum partners to help them utilize beacons with as little friction as possible.

JA: Wise move! “Start by digging into the app, versus the physical location and Bluetooth pinging. Let that fall into place afterward.” Sounds about right, UX/UI informs the entire guest experience. I’m sure there’s a useful feedback loop there as well: when you start with the soft launch sans beacons, you can truly fine tune the details and collect data on the most exciting locations within the museum.

Do you ever find yourself in the position where you need to iterate on the beacon placement? Or, do you find that your clients will rearrange exhibits or plan the next exhibit differently around the “hotspot” information obtained through your analytics?

BC: There are some instances when the beacons are moved (during a specific exhibition), but this rarely happens. And, although the idea of arranging exhibitions according to the data gathered sounds really compelling on paper, most museums and their curatorial and exhibition staff don’t operate in the same capacity as retail experience consultants where the goal is to optimize a space for increased revenue. But, the way museums imagine and enhance their spaces based on new spatial analytics is an idea that is starting to trickle in.

JA: I’m curious, what analytics do you collect? What sort of data are you looking to uncover, and how does it influence your decisions moving forward?

BC: The short answer: every single button, screen, and “action” in our apps is wired up for analytics. Different museum departments have different goals around using the data that is available to them. For education and interpretation, the focus is on which pieces of content are the visitors engaging in and for how long. For marketing and digital, on the other hand, it’s more geared towards overall downloads and impressions.

Leveraging data is certainly an important topic right now, and as Peter Drucker famously once said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” American Alliance of Museums is starting to evangelize the value of gathering and understanding data and we’re big fans of this initiative.

On our end, we’re constantly watching user behavior, while also optimizing and simplifying the product as much as possible. If a feature or screen isn’t being engaged with as much as we or a given partner predicted, there is a good conversation to be had about removing that feature.

We’re firm believers that a visitor who has the best possible experience is more likely to become a member, like, or share over social media or even make a purchase or donation. We’ve kept a close eye on this concept and the relationship between user patterns and conversion rates. A new opportunity exists for museums to have educational tools that have a financial return on investment and we want to help our partners take advantage of this! This is a metric that is super important in this day and age; it helps the museum and also ensures long-term sustainability of the digital tool itself.

JA: Tell me about your ideal client. What sort of museums do you go for?

BC: We work with a wide array of museums, of every shape and size. It makes no difference if the museum welcomes over a million visitors per year, or is a small university gallery - we love them all, and have tools to help! All of the museums we work with put a high emphasis on visitor experience and education. They are looking for time and cost effective ways to have a high quality, high impact on their visitors and members – and that’s where we come in.

JA: Tell me what your process looks like when setting up a museum from beginning to “end”. Does it ever end?

BC: To ensure success for each museum launching a mobile guide, we have a time-tested launch strategy. Every engagement starts with a “Kick-Off” meeting to bring together all departments and staff who will be hand’s-on in driving this initiative to the finish line. We want to make sure every stakeholder is heard and that we fully understand and document the top 3-5 internal goals to make sure everyone’s eye is on the ball. We set various milestones, schedule training time, check-in sessions, and assign every museum a Cuseum concierge! We’re here for every museum we work with, every step of the way.

This process doesn’t end after the app has launched, though - we’re always checking to see how things are going, sharing best practices, and new features. We see this all as a partnership, not as just a “vendor” or a “software” provider – at Cuseum, we’re “Success-as-a-Service” for visitor and member engagement.

JA: And what’s next for Cuseum? You seem to have a great model in place and a lot on your plate. What are your goals for the next year, and what are you most looking forward to?

BC: We’re thrilled about our growth and the direction that things are going! We have many new launches, partnerships, and features in the works. With our core mobile engagement product, and our new digital membership card solution, it’s going to be an exciting year!

Be sure to keep an eye on Cuseum for future developments. And of course, follow Estimote’s blog for special spotlights on apps, features, and use cases utilizing our software and hardware solutions!

Interview by Jess Anderson, Content Creator + Community Manager @ Estimote

Sitting on the right bank of the Grand Canal in Venice, Italy, Ca’ Rezzonico stands tall, a white marble baroque style facade facing the lagoon. Its majesty has been honored amongst other buildings lining the water, as these buildings served as a showpiece for nobility and their wealth for centuries. Ca’ Rezzonico is unique from all other structures along the canal, however; inside, they are managing a fleet of Estimote Location beacons. More importantly though, they are successfully running dual features within their app: real-time positioning, thanks to Estimote Indoor Location SDK, and contextual content notifications with our proximity technology.

Museum Pilot is not just an app, it’s actually a platform. The app may be seen as an evolution of the traditional audio guides normally found in museums. Sure, those classic features are built -in and available. You can search for an exhibit by code number to bring up details about the architecture, ceiling frescos, and sculptures. Or, you can simply hold your Ca’ Rezzonico issued iPad in your hands, and explore the space! The app will automatically activate room information whenever you walk into a new space, providing images, text, audio, and video. If you like spoilers, you can see what’s in the next space over before you even get there, pulling up the corresponding icon on the map to see what exhibit awaits. And perhaps the most innovative feature of all, you can check your real time position while moving or standing on the museum’s virtual map. Cumbersome paper maps are a thing of the past. You can now navigate everything virtually with Museum Pilot.

Several more advanced features are in their design stage and will be released in the upcoming months, like for example the “guided visit” based on each user’s preferences. However, the app represents just half the scope of Museum Pilot. The other half is about the advantages which Museum Pilot brings to the museum management staff, in real time, through their own web-based backend. Thanks to that, they’re able to pull detailed and graphical reports about visits, including preferred rooms, exhibits, paths, and more. Their app enables an interactive questionnaire for guests, which feeds to the backend and creates visitor profiles. Lastly, full and multilingual management of exhibit content, and their positioning on the museum map. Using Estimote SDK, Indoor Location SDK, Estimote Cloud, and of course their home-brewed analytics solution, Museum Pilot puts together the whole package and end-to-end resolution.

“The biggest challenge was the beacon setup. We had to explore issues about the right beacon density, the best practices for placing/orienting beacons, and had to overcome problems of visual impact inside this museum, which happens to be a very important historical palace! The beacons must be practically invisible. The project itself was quite fun. By the way, we learned a lot about the involved art, the history of the palace, and of Venice itself!” -Paolo Bellei, Trient Consulting for Ca’ Rezzonico

One of our favorite games here at Estimote: “Can you spot the beacon?”

A final, fun note to mention is that when Ca Rezzonico was getting ready to launch with our Indoor Location features and installation, they were looking for precision. Here at Estimote, we want our customers to be set up for success. When we knew they needed a little extra help to get the results they were seeking, we flew out to Venice personally alongside our Lead Data Scientist from our Indoor Location team. From there, we made some magic happen.

Next time you’re in Venice, Italy near the Grand Canal, step inside Ca’ Rezzonico to be transported from room to room with contextual audio and video guides, real-time positioning on a paperless map, and guided visits.

Written by Jess Anderson, Content Creator + Community Manager @ Estimote

At Estimote, we’re building an operating system for the physical world, so that conference rooms, event venues, retail spaces, airports, and all kinds of physical spaces can be made more interactive and smarter through software.

For this to work out, apps running on top of such an OS must be able to easily access location of people and objects. It’s an absolutely critical piece of the puzzle, and our Indoor Location SDK is there to provide it.

However, to enable Indoor Location in any venue so far meant manually mapping the space out first. Imagine if wanting to use GPS location in an app required you to drive around the city with laser measure…

That’s why a few months ago, we announced Location Beacons with UWB and automapping. And today, we’re delighted to tell you that they’ve just started shipping!

Lowering the barrier of entry to indoor positioning

We believe easy to deploy, wireless Bluetooth beacons are the way to go for indoor positioning. That’s why more than 2 years ago, we created Estimote Indoor Location—sophisticated software to provide mobile app developers with precise (x,y) position of the user. Since then, we kept iterating on it, making it more accurate, scale to the biggest of spaces, and work in the background.

One thing kept bothering us though: the barrier of entry to Indoor remained high. While deployment is as easy as sticking a bunch of wireless beacons around a space, you still needed to provide a floor plan, and mark the precise position of the beacons on it.

If you wanted to quickly try Indoor out in your office space or at a hackathon, that’s quite a nuisance. If you wanted to set it up in thousands of venues around the country, that’s a logistical nightmare.

Attacking this problem is exactly where we focused our Indoor efforts last year, culminating in the announcement of Estimote Beacons with UWB and automapping earlier this year at CES.

How does it work?

Last year at Estimote, we innovated a ton in the area of beacon-to-beacon communication, adding mesh networking to Estimote Beacons. Beacons could now detect each other and exchange messages.

Building on top of that, we’ve added Ultra Wide Band radio to Location Beacons. Beacons talking to each other over UWB and not Bluetooth means we can use time-of-flight techniques to compute distances between them with inch-level precision. This is extremely critical for automapping, and the reason why we’re excited these beacons are now shipping!

Finally, once we know the distances between the beacons, we’re some simple math away from computing a map of their positions. Okay, the math is actually not that simple, and the computations are quite resource-intensive, so we delegate that part to Estimote Cloud.

The point is, most of this process if fully automated and requires very little involvement from a human being. This makes enabling Indoor Location in a venue a low-cost, low-effort operation.

Try it out with the updated Indoor Location demo app

Automapping brings tremendous time and cost savings when used at scale, but it also makes it much easier to quickly try Indoor Location out.

We updated the Estimote Indoor Location app with automapping, and it’s already in the App Store. It takes about 5 minutes to create your first floor plan and start navigating around it.

Once you’re done checking it out, we’ll upload the floor plan to Estimote Cloud, so that you can use it with the Estimote Indoor SDK in your own project.

One more thing … Introducing “Development” Access Mode

Automapping makes getting started with Indoor Location quick and easy, and with UWB Location Beacons, we’re also introducing another feature to get you up and running with Estimote APIs in no time. We call it “Development” Access Mode, and it opens up all of a beacon’s usually-protected features (such as configuration, secure advertising, or mesh) to any app and user.

    It’s great for the prototyping/ideating phase of your project—focus all your time and effort on building, not on managing beacon ownership, Estimote Accounts, etc.

    It’s great for hackathons—just grab the hardware and start coding. No need to create an account and register your beacons.

    It’s great for sharing—just pass the dev kit, and worry not about having to transfer the ownership so that your colleague can access all the features.     

Naturally, all the security built into Estimote Beacons and APIs is still there. In fact, all it takes to lock your beacons down is to switch the Access Mode flag in Estimote Cloud to “Deployed & Protected”. The change goes into effect immediately, without having to propagate it to beacons, and from now on, only you and the apps you authorized can access all the protected features.

UWB Location Beacon dev kits are the first to start shipping in the “Development” Access Mode by default, which means you’ll be able to enable automapping and Indoor Location right away!

Now shipping!

The first dev kits of Location Beacons with UWB are already on their way to the makers. We expect to clear the backlog of pre-orders very soon, at which point we’ll be shipping them daily.

Enabling Indoor in your venue and adding location context to your app has never been easier!

Buy Location Beacons with UWB
We expect new orders to ship within two weeks

Have questions about UWB, automapping, or Access Modes? We’d love to hear from you, just drop us a line to contact@estimote.com

At Estimote, we’re creating technology that enables software developers to build apps that turn physical spaces into intelligent environments. We’ve seen two different approaches to creating interactions. Many developers have been building proximity based applications by simply putting beacons in desired spots and triggering notifications or interactions in their range. An alternative approach was using beacons in combination with our Indoor Location SDK to obtain precise (x, y) within the location and triggering actions based on the position of the user.

The proximity based method had the advantage of working even in the background when the phone was locked. Today we are happy to announce that our Indoor Location SDK supports precise positioning in both the foreground and background!

Software-defined notifications and triggers, right where you want them

Notifications are a powerful UI pattern in a mobile app’s toolbox. You can push new information to the user as it appears, without having them constantly checking the app. It’s hard to imagine an email client without notifications, isn’t it? Location-based notifications have even more power, as you can surface messages relevant to the user’s current context, that is—where they are.

With the Proximity approach mentioned earlier, the trigger area for your notifications is bound to the range of the beacon’s signal. This means it’s roughly circular in shape, the size of which is determined by the beacon’s transmit power. And if you want to move that area, you have to physically move the beacon.

Having access to the (x,y) position of the user in the background changes the game. You can “paint” your trigger zones in software, make them any shape and size you want, and update them dynamically.

Naturally, you’re not limited to notifications. You can trigger all sorts of events in the background—for example, record in your backend that the user has visited a certain area, and use that information later to provide a better service.

Enhancing experience in museums

In a museum during a guided tour or while exploring on your own with your eyes glued to a guidebook, have you ever wondered if you could get more out of your visit? Could you just roam freely around exploring at your own pace, on your own schedule?

With precise positioning in the background you could easily build an app for a museum that would act as a smart personal guide. As you enter the defined zone in front of an interesting piece of art, your app would provide all the interesting information. All with the phone locked and in your pocket for uttermost convenience!

“Find my friends,” indoors

What else can you do with indoor (x,y) positioning available to you in the background? Here’s an idea.

Instead of wandering around the office looking for a colleague—or more realistically, messaging them “where are you? need to chat F2F” on Slack—how about solving the problem with, you know, software? Having Indoor Location running in the background for you and your friend, you could know whether to head to the water cooler or to their desk.

Or in an event app, it could help reunite a group of friends, so they can head out for drinks together.

Remember that this technology is entirely opt-in, just like sharing your location with a loved one in Apple’s own “Find My Friends” app.

Accurate analytics - heatmaps & pathing

Once you have background Indoor Location integrated in your app, you’re already providing a great experience to the users who opt into it. And there’s still the cherry to top it all off! You can use the position data to get insights into which areas are more popular than others, what paths the users are taking to get there, and more. Indoor Location in the background has the same accuracy as in the foreground—much more granular than the proximity-based approach.

Just remember that a great user experience and respecting your users’ privacy comes first. There’s not much of an upside if people don’t opt-in, or uninstall your app.

What about the battery?

Indoor Location in the background is powered by the same low-energy beacon technology you already know. We’re using a fusion of packets carefully chosen to make use of the most energy efficient iOS APIs for beacon detection. This tight integration between software and hardware pays off. We’ve run the numbers, and positioning in the background uses only 2% of your iPhone’s battery per hour. An app running for a full work day will not drain your phone any more than 30 minutes of YouTube. And if you use your phone a lot, you probably won’t even notice, as the energy usage is just a fraction of what’s needed to power the display.

Try it now!

To get started, you need one dev kit of Location Beacons with UWB and the Indoor Location app. Thanks to UWB and Estimote Automapping, you’ll have a map of your room and a blue dot inside it in just 5 minutes.

Once you have the location up and running—turn on the background mode, lock your phone, and see how your position changes in Estimote Cloud or on other device running the app. (To turn the background positioning on in the Indoor app, tap on your avatar and flip the appropriate switch.)

If you already have the location configured, all you need to do is to turn on the Background mode in the beacon required for the background mode.

And to learn how to integrate all of that into your own app, head to our Indoor tutorial on the Estimote Developer Portal.

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.

When iBeacon was launched, it had a robust API with just three predefined proximity zones: immediate, near, and far. It’s a very pragmatic design, dictated by the physics of the 2.4 GHz radio waves.

In 2014, we set out to build a more powerful location API, one that gives you the (x,y) position of the user. We applied complex algorithms to signals from built-in sensors and nearby beacons, the placement of which we know from an automatically-generated floor plan. That’s how Estimote Indoor Location for iOS was born—one of the very first pieces of our operating system for the physical world.

The best way to build a complex piece of software such as an OS is to do it brick-by-brick. And today, we’re adding a new one: Estimote Indoor Location for Android.

Upgrade your Android app from Proximity to Location

Estimote Proximity SDK for Android has been available almost since the beginning. It offers an API with simple “did enter/exit beacon’s range” events, basic proximity zones, and distance estimations.

Upgrading to Indoor Location API means the canvas for developing apps for the physical world gets much richer. You operate within 1 m “blue-dot” accuracy, instead of just a few proximity zones. You can “paint” indoor geofences of any shape and size, and “re-paint” them entirely in software without the need to physically move beacons. It’s like jumping from writing apps for an 80-character-wide terminal to writing for a 4K screen.

How to get started

You can find the Android Indoor Location SDK on Estimote’s GitHub. It comes bundled with an example app, so you can just clone the repo and try it right away.

You can use the floor plans you already have in Estimote Cloud. Otherwise, get a kit of Location Beacons with UWB, and let them automatically create a floor plan for you. Small caveat: the mapping app is currently iOS-only, so dust your iPhone off or borrow one from a friend. Automapping takes just a few minutes—your Android-wielding colleagues won’t have time to notice you’re holding a forbidden device in your hands.

Feedback wanted!

Contrary to iOS, the Android ecosystem is extremely diverse. In fact, that’s exactly why we first rolled Indoor Location out for iOS only. We were just getting started, and it was much easier for us to ensure quality with just a few iPhone models to optimize for.

Fast forward to today—we’ve learned a lot, and over time, our Android Proximity SDK has already accumulated a ton of workarounds for quirks we discovered in various Android devices. Much of that happened with the help of our developer community: your emails, your bug reports, and your forum posts.

Android Indoor Location SDK is out now, and all we ask is: try it, and keep the feedback coming! You can find our Indoor Location engineers on Estimote forums, or email us at contact@estimote.com.

Buy Indoor Location dev kit
Includes 4 × Location Beacons with UWB and automapping

Last week Bluetooth SIG — the organization helping push forward the most popular wireless connectivity technology — announced Bluetooth Mesh, a completely new wireless communication standard built on top of their existing stack.

Bluetooth Mesh, a protocol that the industry has been working on for a couple of years, leverages the existing Bluetooth 4.x/5.0 Low Energy stack and associated advertising and GATT services to provide reliable and secure connectivity between hundreds or even thousands of BLE-enabled nodes.

We are extremely excited about the approved standard. It will open a new frontier of innovative real world applications that we have always pushed towards.

Our own implementation of low-power BLE mesh

In fact, we’ve been working on our own low-power BLE mesh implementation for a couple of years now. That’s because at Estimote, we’re in the business of building highly scalable location intelligence software often running on thousands of wireless nodes. Deploying and maintaining these beacon networks at scale has to be time, labor, and cost efficient.

We were never excited about gateways or other powered devices to sync with beacons. When deployed in thousands of locations, gateways massively impact ROI and introduce deployment complexity.

“Talk is cheap. Listening is expensive”

That’s why last year we released our own — and the world’s first — low-power BLE mesh implementation. With just a firmware update, it enabled our customers to group Estimote beacons into networks that can sync settings or even upgrade firmware from one beacon to another.

One of our engineers likes to say, “Beacons are similar to people: talk is cheap but listening is expensive.” A Bluetooth device constantly advertising some data doesn’t experience much of a hit to battery life, but if it has to constantly “listen” by scanning the network so that it can accept and repeat messages, the battery drains much faster.

But for applications where we need to occasionally remotely update beacon settings, perform auto-mapping with UWB, collect sensor data or flash new firmware, high latency is not that important. In these cases it’s acceptable if new settings take a minute or so to propagate within the entire beacon network.

New firmware with routed BLE mesh

What’s important for us is not only how intelligent a beacon network can be, but also how power efficient it is. That’s why we are pleased to introduce today another firmware update, which brings both intelligent routing and messages to our mesh architecture.

Initially, our low-power mesh network could only use a flooding protocol, meaning that every single device in the mesh network was involved in changing the settings. A change meant for just 2 devices placed close to each other needed to be processed by hundreds of devices in the network. Obviously, this caused huge losses of performance and energy. On top of that, each of those devices had the same settings as a result.

Addressing and mesh messages

Thanks to addressing, a single message can contain a piece of data dedicated for a particular device. Only the minimum number of required devices will consume the message using just a portion of their power. For Remote Fleet Management, this means energy saving and, just as importantly, that different configurations of a single setting can be used for different devices in the network. Constraints introduced by the first version of the low-power mesh network disappear.

Routed mesh

Our routing protocol allows you to send messages over a precisely defined and optimized path consisting of particular devices. Simple routing is not efficient enough from a power efficiency perspective, though. It lets you optimize the time of propagation, but a truly smart low-power network needs to go further — it should consider physical distance, the type of devices, their battery levels, and much more to properly balance the traffic. That is the reason we decided to take advantage of Estimote Cloud in calculating the optimal routing tables.

Our commitment to implement standardized mesh

Both addressing and routing are exactly these kinds of improvements, ones that you don’t need to think about. In practice, it means you can now define settings for each device independently. They will be applied to your network with a single message propagated over selected devices. In the future it will enable us to introduce much more advanced interactions.

Since Bluetooth SIG Mesh standard is official now and vendors like Nordic have already published new soft-devices for their chips, we are committing to implement a “friend mode” feature of the standardized mesh, to ensure our beacons will be compatible with other Bluetooth SIG mesh devices. Our nodes will continue to use our low-power implementation, to guarantee the highest possible power efficiency.

Get started with BLE mesh using beacons today

You can try the routed low-power mesh right away, just follow the tutorial we’ve prepared and you’ll be able to make a blinking beacon matrix as above in minutes.

To use these new mesh capabilities just update your beacons to firmware 4.13.0 (or later). To test straight away go to Cloud, set two different majors for two beacons in the same mesh, and connect to just one of the meshed beacons. You will see data propagating very quickly and you’ll be able to see that both have that new major applied. If your devices are already in a mesh, you need to update just one device and the others will update automatically.

Marcin Klimek, Product Manager at Estimote

Rafał Ociepa, Community Manager at Estimote

In 2014 we launched Estimote Cloud. Initially, it was a web dashboard where developers could visually manage the beacons they owned. Then, we introduced Fleet Management API which allowed developers to programmatically configure their beacons from their own code and apps, including any backend systems, e.g. CMS. This change significantly shortened the configuration and deployment phase. To protect our clients’ beacon networks we added cloud-based security authentication and UUID rotation, preventing unauthorized access and piggybacking on your beacon infrastructure. Later on, we added Analytics API, giving our customers the capability to measure the engagement of their users based on interactions with Estimote beacons and places they were installed in.

Same software, your isolated infrastructure

Today, our Cloud Services are used by a vibrant community of more than 100,000 developers, generating billions of requests to our servers. In the last 18 months, the Estimote Cloud infrastructure gained traction and has powered some of the largest commercial beacon deployments by Fortune 500 companies. The core experiences of those solutions rely on our integrated firmware, SDK and cloud services. Naturally, it wouldn’t be possible if we didn’t provide enterprise-level trust, control, and scalability.

To meet those growing requirements we’re introducing Estimote Private Cloud, which is designated for the most demanding applications.

Beacon Containers

With Estimote Private Cloud, you have more control over your data and this part of your business. Since we use Docker Containers it can be run in a completely isolated environment in any place of the world, and at the same time can be scaled and updated with ease (e.g. using AWS or Azure services). You’ll still have access to the full functionality of Estimote Cloud Services and you’ll continue to have it in the future — all of the updates to our standard Cloud will be applied to the Private Cloud as well. Estimote Private Cloud helps you to ensure data compliance for your service infrastructure, and gives you absolute access to resources which are not shared with our other customers. The computational power of instances that run your private Estimote Cloud is entirely up to you and you can adapt it to your needs on the fly. Our iOS and Android mobile SDKs can be easily configured to point to your private beacon infrastructure allowing you to seamlessly move between Estimote Cloud and your own Private Cloud with no interruptions.

Setup your own Private Cloud

If you would like to integrate Estimote Private Cloud, we can setup it for you in a matter of days. We’ll give you the full assistance of our team in moving your data to a private infrastructure. After all, you’re also getting premium support from our side as part of the complete package!

To get started with Estimote Private Cloud, simply contact our Sales Team.

Contact Sales Team

Here at Estimote, we take two approaches to physical-world context:

• (Indoor) Location and
• Proximity

Indoor location utilizes signals from multiple beacons and provides accurate coordinates. Proximity is relatively simple, and gives basic information such as “somewhere near beacon X.” The main advantage of a proximity solution is its simplicity to set up - you just tag a certain area with a beacon and detect whether you are within the beacon’s range. The majority of apps relying on the proximity method use something quite naive, such as "Can I hear the signal from the beacon or not?” A naive approach due to beacon physics usually leads to poor results, with disappointing reliability.

With Estimote Monitoring, we are applying complex math and models on top of a ton of research we’ve poured into how the iOS Bluetooth stack works, to improve reliability of enter/exit reporting. Today we are releasing a significant update to Estimote Monitoring, with more configuration flexibility and better accuracy.

What is Estimote Monitoring 2.0?

Estimote Monitoring 2.0 is an update to Estimote Monitoring 1.1, which means it retains all the advantages over CoreLocation Monitoring that you get from the previous versions:

• Events will happen closer to your expected distance
• You will get even more reliable enter/exits
• You will get exits without a fixed time threshold
• You are no longer limited to monitoring only for 20 regions

On top of all that, it adds:

• More accurate enter/exit events
• A software defined range

We made it even more precise

By leveraging our experience with Indoor Location, we managed to achieve the perfect compound of filtering data and ideal packet combination. This mixture ensures both precision of classification inside the beacon’s range, and stability of reported proximity.

We regularly deal with all the sensor data (including RSSI values) that we could obtain from a phone. To understand and use this data, we need to filter out measurement errors and perform signal processing. Using our know-how, we can find the perfect filter types and parameters to make sure the experience that you build on top of our SDK handles both dynamic and static cases equally well.

With this release, we focused on improving the filtering parameters so now we are more precise with detecting the exact spot of an “enter” event.

No more pre-defined zones

Context is all about micro-location, thus some applications require the range to be narrowed. Instead of connecting to a beacon and setting different tx powers or even physically shielding the beacon, you could utilize any desired range by using our Estimote Monitoring.

With a software defined range, you are no longer restricted to trigger one action per beacon. Imagine hailing a ride-share while the car is far away, having a screen to accept the fare pop-up as the cars pulls next to you, and then getting the option to rate the ride once you are safely inside. You could not achieve this without Estimote Monitoring.

With the previous version of Estimote Monitoring, we had predefined 3 distances where events could happen. With this release, we give you the ability to fully customize those distances. Now you could either use a very close distance for an experience similar to NFC, or very long distances to maximize the area coverage of your beacon (of course within the maximum range allotted for your beacon.)

We would like to hear from YOU!

We encourage you to use Estimote Monitoring to build on top of it and delight your users with predictable and repeatable experiences matching their expectations.

Estimote Monitoring 2.0 is available in our iOS SDK. Give it a try and share your thoughts on our forums or drop us an email.

We think of Estimote Beacons as the building blocks of physical location intelligence. We put a lot of stock in sensors that collect relevant ambient information for their surroundings. These sensors are cornerstones of data driven decisions for intelligent indoor spaces. One of these sensors is a magnetometer, which enables some very interesting use cases.

On one level, having a magnetometer means you can easily check if the beacon is installed properly — many sources of interference will also impact the magnetic field around the beacon. You can leverage this sensor for a smoother, more reliable deployment. In addition, you can also use the ambient magnetic fields to record a “fingerprint” of the location, making sure it can’t be spoofed, and adding another layer of sensors to your intelligent location arsenal.

For a while now, Estimote Location Beacons have had magnetometers installed. We’ve included magnetometer readings in our Estimote Telemetry packet due to popular demand, but we haven’t really put that feature in the spotlight before. It’s time to change that.

What is a magnetometer?

A magnetometer is a device that can measure changes in the magnetic field. It can be easily used as magnetic metal detector. The appearance of a chunk of magnetic material nearby is one of the most common reasons for changes in the magnetic field. Why a “magnetic metal,” and not just any metal, like with a metal detector? Magnetometers are different from metal detectors, since the latter can detect all metals — while magnetometers can only detect a special group of metals (i.e. magnetic metals) such as iron, nickel, cobalt, or their alloys, like steel.

Some of the larger-scale applications for magnetometers include searching for sunken ships, submarines, or underground structures — useful for those of you with archeological inclinations! Most of us probably won’t be diving for doubloons, though. If you set out north to watch the northern lights, though, magnetometers can be used to detect indications of auroral activity before the actual light show begins. In spacecraft, one of the more common uses for magnetometers is altitude sensing. Closer to home, magnetometers are also sometimes used in airports to san for concealed weapons.

A big difference between a magnetometer and a metal detector is the scope: detectors typically have a shorter range, while magnetometers can detect large magnetic objects from several dozen feet. The question “What’s a large object made of iron or steel that I might want to detect from quite far away?” has at least one pretty obvious answer.

Real-world uses for magnetometers

There are several, but one of the more interesting ones is very relevant in today’s world. Magnetometers are commonly used to detect the presence of cars. Some of the specific applications here include counting free spaces in car parks, measuring traffic loads by counting the number of cars passing on a given fragment of the road, creating adaptive traffic lights, and more.

Let’s imagine a multi-floor car park with hundreds of parking spaces. When you’re desperately trying to find a free one in order to make it in time for the movie, wouldn’t it be cool to be able to quickly find a free spot? If you have beacons placed in each of the parking spaces, they can detect if a car is occupying that space or not, and send that data to a server that can then feed your phone (or the digital display in the parking lot) data on how many free spaces there are, and where to find them.

An added bonus? No cables, no complex installation procedures, and no need for multiple “gateways” for the beacons to send their data to the web. All it takes is one person with a phone.

How can you start using it?

With Estimote beacons, you get this type of sensor right in the palm of your hand (or on your wall, as the case may be). We know you can use it to make amazing things.

Location Beacon’s magnetometers provide you with raw readings from the sensor. You can use our iOS and Android SDKs (starting with version 4.5 and 1.0.0, respectively) to get a reading from the magnetometer in the Estimote Telemetry packet. This will provide you with the values for x, y, and z axes, corresponding to three-dimensional coordinates. For best results, you should measure the values on site, where you want to deploy the beacon (bear in mind that the results may be impacted by magnetic objects in the vicinity — even your car on the other side of the wall can change the readings).

In essence, though, this means you only need to have an app you build for this purpose running on a device somewhere in the beacon’s range to know exactly when — and for how long — a car has been in the vicinity of the beacon. That said, the beacons aren’t calibrated — don’t use them as compasses and make sure you offset each beacon’s readings individually.

Here’s how you can read that data using our Android SDK

And our iOS SDK

Grab yourself a couple of Location Beacons — and you’re now ready to go out and find some buried treasures (provided they’re big enough)!

Buy Long Range Location Beacons

Rafał Ociepa, Community Manager at Estimote

Marcin Klimek, Product Manager at Estimote

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

In the beginning, our hardware and software were capable of just broadcasting and understanding iBeacon packets. But from the very start we’ve had a much broader vision and wanted to create an operating system for the physical world. One of the first steps was to release the Indoor SDK for iOS, which created a whole new area of possibilities for defining location based actions. Then we used all of our know-how in order to add the next brick to the foundation of our physical world OS, by creating the Android version of the Indoor SDK.

However, the physical world isn’t only for people. In industrial applications, robots start to play a major role and consequently they need to navigate and understand the physical world that surrounds them as well.

Locating people and robots

That’s why we are taking the next step and releasing an SDK for robotics. The SDK uses the same robust Location Beacons with UWB that we began shipping in May 2017 and provides you with precise, real-time positioning. A combination of Bluetooth and UWB signal measurements is used to precisely calculate the 2D coordinates inside a location.

It is fully integrated with our current stack. That means that you’ll be able to see the robot’s position in our Cloud, request it using our Cloud API, or even add robotic integrations to your mobile apps using iOS and Android Indoor SDKs. Using the SDK will take only a few of hours to create an app for managing an entire fleet of your robots as the mobile SDKs will give you full information about their position. There are no limits in terms of the size of the location, or the number of robots that are simultaneously using the Estimote beacon infrastructure to position themselves. The robots will also be able to know one another’s position thanks to their connection to Estimote Cloud - or using Estimote Mesh when you are offline.

Raspberry + UWB beacons = Robot positioning in minutes

Indoor for robotics works almost the same way as Indoor for mobile phones, but instead of a phone there is a ROS (Robot Operating System) compatible hardware like Raspberry Pi. All you need to get started is at least two Location beacon with UWB devkits. Thanks to automapping, creating a map of the location that your robots navigate within takes only a couple of minutes, instead of hours when done manually. This saves you a lot of time, which you can use to create your solution. If you’ve already created a location using Location beacons with UWB, you won’t need to change or perform any other actions to prepare it for Indoor SDK for robotics.

The main part of this release is a ROS package which you can find here. You can easily integrate it with your ROS based robotic solution. You need to connect one of the beacons with your hardware solution using the beacon GPIO pins. They are used both to transfer the data and to power the beacon from your robot, as the beacon will require more energy to constantly collect, process, and transfer data to your hardware.

Since using the UWB module consumes much more power than broadcasting Bluetooth packets, we have also developed algorithms that will help optimize energy efficiency in the beacons that you place on the walls.

How do I get started?

If you are into robotics or if you want to know how to start your first project and integrate it with the Estimote stack, we encourage you to read this detailed technical post on how Estimote Robotics SDK works. There you will find a step by step tutorial describing how to set up positioning for your robot. You can purchase the Location beacons with UWB here:

Buy Location Beacons with UWB

If you have any questions don’t hesitate to contact our team. We will try to answer all your robotics related questions.
Contact us

A few weeks ago we released Estimote Monitoring 2.0, our own API for proximity-based enter/exit events. This new version means even better accuracy, and software-defined zones. Today, we’re making Estimote Monitoring enabled by default on Estimote Beacons, greatly simplifying the process of building proximity-based apps.

Before, when you received your beacons, you had to tweak their broadcasting power to the desired range. Many developers would also build their own RSSI filters to further fine-tune where the proximity events should trigger. Planning for scale meant even more configuration — assigning common UUID/major/minor values to group the beacons into at most 20 regions.

Now, you get your beacons with Estimote Monitoring enabled by default. You can start building right away with a software-defined range, ability to monitor for each beacon individually (while still being able to group them using software), and Indoor-Location-quality RSSI filters.

Software-defined range

Previously, to trigger enter/exit events at 5 meters away from the beacon, you had to adjust the broadcasting power. To trigger events at a different distance, you had to reconfigure the beacon.

And then, tweaking the physical range only gives you a limited set of options. For example, -40 dBm = 0.5 m range, -20 dBm = 5 m range. If you wanted your enter event to trigger at 2 meters, that meant building your own RSSI filters.

With Estimote Monitoring enabled by default, you don’t need to do any configuration. You can adjust the range of the enter events by changing one line of code. And since the range is “virtual”, you can even have multiple enter/exit zones defined for each beacon.

Better accuracy & reliability, built-in

One of the common tasks when building proximity into an app is fine-tuning your beacon-handling code for the best reliability and user experience. For example, if the signal temporarily gets obstructed and a beacon disappears from scanning results, only to re-appear a few seconds later, you would need to write your own debouncer to handle that.

Enabling Estimote Monitoring by default takes most of it away. It borrows from our Indoor Location algorithms and know-how, so you don’t need to spend time building your own filtering logic. It also goes beyond just the software/SDK layer. At Estimote, we optimize both the hardware (≈ antenna) and firmware (≈ broadcasting) to make proximity work great out-of-the-box.

We’re tracking numerous metrics to measure our performance, and we believe “recall” is the most important one.

A perfect recall score means that you get an “enter” event immediately when you enter proximity of a beacon, and you get no false “exit” events as long as you remain in the proximity. Every second you’re in range, but the API is saying you’re outside range, lowers the recall.

By using Estimote Monitoring, we’ve improved the recall score almost 3 times over the previous configuration.

Per-beacon monitoring, with no limits

Designing your iOS app with scalability in mind previously meant working with the 20-region limit. You had to figure out how to structure your deployment, and physically assign a common UUID/major/minor to multiple beacons to form the regions. If your needs changed and you wanted different groups, it required re-configuring the beacons.

Estimote Monitoring is capable of per-beacon enter/exit detection, with no limits. Having it enabled by default means you can immediately put up all the beacons you have, and group and regroup them any time you want, in software — for example, by tagging the beacons in Estimote Cloud, and accessing those tags in your own app via our RESTful API. More flexibility, less configuration costs.

Try it!

All of this is available with Proximity Beacons out-of-the-box now. Since Estimote Monitoring builds on top of the same technologies that power Estimote Indoor Location, it works by default for Location Beacons, too.

If you are about to order a dev kit, now is a good time to try it out!

Buy Proximity Beacons

If you already have beacons, here’s how to enable Estimote Monitoring and experience all of the glory. Then you can kick back, and enjoy the time you just saved!