Estimote year-end summary and our plans for 2017

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

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

Summary of 2016 by Estimote

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Founders of Estimote, Inc

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