Estimote Blog

Hi HN, this is Jakub - Founder of Estimote (YC S13). FastCo Design did a great piece of our new product. It's essentialy a Bluetooth beacon powered by USB. Thanks to HDMI port it can be connected to any TV or digital display and it scans for BLE signals. People with mobile apps broadcast these signals and can influence content of screens around. You can read more how it works here: http://blog.estimote.com/post/150398268230/launching-estimote-mirror-t… Will be more than happy to answer any questions here.

Hey, Tanuj from Estimote here. Stickers and Beacons are meant to be complementary products. Beacons are great to attaching to fixed points inside venues - museums, stores, sports stadiums, etc. They add location context to a physical space. Stickers, on the other hand, are small and discrete enough to be attached to objects. Put it on any item to turn it into a nearable, a smart, connected object that broadcasts data about its location, motion and temperature. You can read more about our vision on our blog: http://blog.estimote.com/post/95382199590/nearables-are-here-introduci…

https://blog.estimote.com/post/676268055242883072/apple-opens-u1-api-a… (February 2022): “another wireless communication technology called ultra-wideband, or UWB — specifically Apple’s UWB solution with the Nearby Interaction framework and Apple U1 chip-enabled devices, including AirTags. UWB provides precise location and distance ranging, much like the older iBeacon technology but more predictably and accurately. In fact, UWB RF ranging can detect distances as close as a few centimeters!” I don’t know what range it provides, but it apparently can be used for fining your phone, so 10m seems not out of reach.

This maturity measure seems related to blog post driven development, as outside-in development. Are there any other related principles, approaches, and measures? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outside%E2%80%93in_software_development http://blog.estimote.com/post/119525082855/user-stories-on-steroids-ho… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=958480

http://blog.estimote.com/post/97824495825/ios-8-pushes-location-contex… It's context cum geofencing. I might be mistaken though.

For the average iPhone-toting person whose location is the one being plotted, what does their phone have to be set to in order for this to work? Do they have to have a specific app installed? Does Bluetooth merely have to be turned on? What about "Bluetooth turned on, but not visible to unpaired devices"? Might anyone be able to point out the direction to information of the sort? I see some information here [0], but I am not sure how this relates to common settings like "Bluetooth off", "Bluetooth on and visible", and "Bluetooth on but invisible to unknown devices." http://blog.estimote.com/post/106913675010/how-do-beacons-work-the-phy…

I'm using an 'iBeacon' (raspberry pi) in a museum setting to nudge visitors entering a certain gallery: "if you'd like to take our Matisse audio tour…" They slide that notification and iOS opens our app directly to the audio tour. Here's a much richer interactive tour: http://blog.estimote.com/post/77385955199/estimote-beacons-are-enrichi…

Hey there, First, a full disclosure: I'm a Community Evangelist at Estimote, a beacon startup. Now, to the point: I believe saying that iBeacon is about tracking customers and targeted ads is missing the point. iBeacon is about providing apps with microlocation context. Of course you can use it to deliver ads through your apps or to track users, but if there's no value for the users, why would they install the app in the first place? iBeacon is not privacy violator or value adder by itself. It's a tool developers can utilize, just like GPS data, or Google/Apple Maps, or any kind of API, to enable their apps with new funcionalities. Beacons will most likely serve as kind of a 'web cookies for the physical world' because of their contextual marketing potential, but this doesn't mean beacon-enabled apps will not hold any value for the end user. There already are businesses building pretty cool solutions on top of iBeacon, ranging from dining apps (Downtown, Cover, Tab), smart office platforms (Robin), museum apps (Canadian Museum of Nature, Brooklyn Museum), to dating apps (Blinq). We wrote about some of the examples we find pretty awesome: http://blog.estimote.com/post/108266442445/ibeacon-fueling-startups-gr… It's all about the experience you deliver. Beacons can be used to deliver tons of value (frictionless mobile payments, location aware audioguides, home automation). But at the end of the day, iBeacon is just a protocol for broadcasting a string of numbers over…