Today we’re excited to announce a really powerful evolution to the Estimote Platform that we launched last fall: a brand new API that allows you to integrate the remote management capabilities of Estimote Cloud into any of your own apps and back-ends. In other words, managing beacon networks at scale just became incredibly elegant and seamless. This API is available today in private beta (more details below) and will transition to fully open soon.
Before we go into the technical details, some quick thoughts on the strategy and thinking behind how we approach product development.
Building a developer-centric platform
When we set out to build Estimote over two years ago, our goal was to be a true technology platform for beacons. In following this strategy, we stay close to a few guiding principles. First and foremost, every product and business decision we make must be uncompromisingly focused on delivering value to people who build products. Sometimes people interpret that to mean our products are only good for developers who spend time on side projects and “hacks.” In reality, we optimize for the creator (40,000 and counting), whether that be a mobile engineer working at a Fortune 100 company building beacons in to the next major release, or a startup founder thinking up the next killer app that will touch millions of consumers. Regardless of what they are dreaming up, developers simply need software and tools that make their lives easier—systems that are flexible, extensible and scalable.
Second, we don’t try to be one-size-fits-all. Smart engineers don’t want a “solution” forced upon them. In other words, when building a platform, knowing what not to build is just as important as what we do put on our roadmap. It’s one of the reasons we don’t focus too much on a content management system (CMS) tied to beacons. We sell beacons worldwide to engineers in diverse industries (retail, transportation, health care, nuclear, and even outer space!). We recognize we could never provide a turnkey solution suited to the diverse needs of all those verticals. Instead, developers specializing in their areas of passion should have the tools and freedom to build on top of Estimote’s infrastructure, using rich web services to do so. We really admire best-in-breed companies who have built platforms with this approach, from Stripe to Twilio to Docker.
That last point dovetails nicely with our third principle: the only way Estimote can make money is if others are able to build value in adjacent areas of the stack. The hardware and software we build should encourage other companies to derive more value from their own products and services—whether a Big Company mobile PM in New York, an agency designer in London, or a Japanese startup ninja. If we provide the right mix of solid products and exceptional support which extends elegantly from lab prototyping through to full-scale rollout, many companies will prosper together.
Managing a beacon network at scale
As iBeacon rapidly matures and larger networks are deployed, we’re constantly working on solving new challenges that emerge at scale. Whether that’s speeding up development, hardening security or readying beacons for Apple’s latest platform, we work to anticipate roadblocks and eliminate them before you get stuck.
A common question we get is how does the infrastructure work when beacons are deployed across thousands of remote locations. What happens when you need to update settings, check on battery life, etc.? In recent months, we’ve pushed a series of updates to Estimote Cloud and the Estimote iOS App that provide easy and efficient ways to do all of that.
And now we are extending the Estimote Fleet Management API to allow you to programmatically configure updates to your beacons’ settings from within your own code, including from back end tools of your choice. It’s effectively the same functionality as what you can do today from our Cloud Dashboard. All of your beacons will get updated as soon as you enter range if the Estimote iOS App is installed on your smartphone.
Integration with Estimote SDK 3.0
But again, the real power is in APIs that extend to your platform. That’s why we made the Fleet Management API work with our brand new 3.0 SDK. We added a set of new methods that allow you to embed this functionality directly into your own iOS app. Managing your beacon fleet is now totally scalable, using your distributed app as the proxy to seamlessly reconfigure deployed beacons. The update functionality even works in true background mode, meaning as soon as a beacon is within range of a phone with your app installed, staged updates will propagate through your entire beacon network.
We’re big fans of this approach to at-scale fleet management, particularly because it requires no additional hardware, specialized technicians, or expensive overhead. It’s fast, scalable and seamless. This new API is available as a private beta today. For access, please email Tanuj on our Business Team.
Calling all beacon CMS’s
We love that tons of “Beacon CMS’s” have popped up around the world, specializing in diverse industries and catering to a variety of domain-specific needs. Many of these CMS companies already integrate with Estimote and the Fleet Management API will make those integrations even more powerful. If you’re building a beacon CMS, this API lets you focus on your part of the value chain while Estimote powers the underlying beacon infrastructure for you and the end customer.
This modular approach makes your beacon CMS product much more robust. Now your customers can not only manage content, but also the network itself. Take a company like Rover, one of the most elegant CMS’s in the beacon space today. Now their customers can not only manage all their marketing campaigns and analytics, but will soon be able to also monitor and update their beacon network distributed across thousands of stores—all from one central dashboard.
At Estimote we deeply believe that platforms are only as good as how extensible they remain in to the future. The reality is it takes unbelievable engineering and a vision to move a platform forward while at the same time making sure things don’t break. And this is precisely why beacon infrastructure is not an interchangeable commodity. We’re super excited to power a whole new generation of applications with beacons and are committed to working hard to create the developer-facing tools to do so.
Thoughts, questions, concerns?
As always, we’re here to answer questions, listen to feedback and discuss anything and everything beacons. Please reach out any time and stay tuned for more feature updates in the weeks ahead. Feel free to drop us a line and ping us on Twitter anytime!
Tanuj Parikh, Head of Business at Estimote
Arek Flinik, Senior Software Developer at Estimote