Software applications of the future will not be developed just for mobile phones, tablets or desktop computers. They will not be optimized for Android, iOS or Windows. They won’t be tested to run on Chrome and Safari, or in portrait and landscape mode.
Apps of the future will be designed and developed for the physical world, for spaces and locations full of people, tied to intelligent connected objects, smart buildings, and maybe even autonomously moving cars and drones.
New software languages will be invented. New job titles for real-world developers will emerge. Engineers and designers will leave their desks and screens. They will design and develop experiences on-site, walking around the space using their bodies and gestures, crafting perfect real-time context for notifications, experiences and interactions. The physical world will be the new canvas for developers.
The mobile phones that people carry around will use an emergent physical layer to talk to sensors which are incorporated into ordinary objects. Beacons will be integrated into walls, allowing venues to seamlessly communicate with users. Altogether this new network will create a new type of virtual machine, a sort of standardized software stack that apps will run on top of, and can be duplicated and copied from one venue to another, e.g. from one airport to the new one, from one retailer in the US to another retailer in Europe etc.
Retail will become software-defined and stores will turn into inventory-less showrooms where visitors can add goods to virtual carts just by touching or interacting with them. Consumers will decide which part of the showroom they want to recreate in their home and the moment they leave store items will be shipped to their location. Future retail experience will be personal and will resemble the best experiences known today from museums or exhibitions.
How do we know the future?
Because we’re helping create it. Over the past two years more than 50,000 developers representing the world’s best agencies, Fortune 500 companies, and startups have used our products and software stack to rapidly innovate inside their real-world businesses.
The world’s largest retailers have built amazing experiences and beautiful apps that are drawing people to stores and helping them search, navigate and find merchandise in ways that were only possible online.
FC Barcelona, one of the world’s top sports clubs, is using beacons at their home arena to connect with their most engaged fans. Supporters visiting Camp Nou receive location-relevant information including promotions and tickets.
Varier Furniture, a Norwegian furniture company incorporated sticker beacons into their beautifully designed chairs during the manufacturing process; a companion mobile app enabled their customers to engage with their products in a completely new way.
The Guggenheim Museum in New York is displaying contextual information about nearby art and even remembers your most favorite paintings when you leave.
Passengers visiting Hamad International Airport are now one click away from precise navigation that can lead them to their gate and check them in. That’s because Qatar Airways has equipped the airport with a network of Estimote Beacons.
Innovations we brought to market last year
2015 saw an acceleration of new deployments across many verticals, made possible thanks to our robust software stack, code that we obsess about shipping to our community of developers every month.
Our list of software was already long in 2014 and we added much more last year, shipping tons of improvements and updates across our entire stack. Here are some of the most important ones:
- Infrastructure Sharing made it possible to open private beacon network to third-party app developers and experiment with cross promotion or new monetization models
- Flip to sleep saved developers time and effort by simulating enter and exit events
- Real-time analytics gave a new powerful tool to measure key project metrics
- Remote fleet management allowed to configure large beacon networks at scale
- Indoor Location made it possible to locate users down to 1.5m precision
- Updated Android Stack brought the latest innovations to our Android community
- Eddystone support allowed broadcasting of URLs in the new beacon format from Google
- Improved security introduced new layer of security for final deployments
- Location Intelligence Platform enabled location tracking of objects in the physical world
- App Templates streamlined the app prototyping and demoing process
Plans for 2016 and a welcome to our new partners
At Estimote our mission is to help developers and innovators delight mobile users with magical experiences. We focus on streamlining development and deployment processes by creating something we love to call an ‘OS for the physical world’, a real breakthrough in how software is built. And changing the world is much easier with great partners.
That’s why we are happy to announce our $10.7M Series A investment round today led by Javelin Venture Partners with participation from Digital Garage, Homebrew, Box Group, Commerce Ventures, Josh McFarland (Founder and CEO of TellApart) and a strong group of strategic angel investors.
We are excited for Noah and Alex from Javelin to join our board and help us build the future of contextual computing. Noah previously co-founded Keyhole and directed Google’s enterprise product line for geo-spatial products, Google Earth and Google Maps. Alex co-founded ooma (NYSE: OOMA) and brings strong consumer hardware and software experience. The investment will help us to accelerate innovation and expand our operations in New York, in our European office in Krakow and expand our San Francisco office.
Thank you for staying with us and we look forward to an incredible year ahead!
Jakub Krzych, Steve Cheney, Lukasz Kostka - Founders of Estimote