Estimote Launches Indoor Location Service Using iBeacon Tech

Estimote, maker of hardware beacon devices and a platform for managing software that uses beacon connections, such as Apple’s iBeacon system, has just launched its Indoor Location features. The Indoor Location system that Estimote provides works with the company’s existing beacons, and its updated iOS app. Setup is simple, Estimote says, and requires simply arranging a minimum of four of its devices in a room to define a space.

The Indoor Location feature uses beacons placed around a room to map a space using a quick orientation process using the app, with directions provided by the software itself. Once you’ve spent a few minutes setting up the relative location positioning, it’ll let you generate a code snippet that you can then inject in other apps to give them indoor location awareness. If you’re setting up a gallery exhibit, for instance, you could incorporate Estimote Indoor Location to give your visitors precise, step-by-step instructions about navigating the various installations as they walk around your space.

Estimote had previously offered proximity-gate functionality, meaning that a beacon could be made aware of your device once it was within range, and start some behavior accordingly, with varied proximity distances available depending on a developer’s needs. What they couldn’t do, was give precise indoor location; proximity was more of an on/off flag, with variable distance, rather than a pinpoint measurement system, which Indoor Location can actually provide.

Of course, aside from offering consumer-facing features like detailed indoor guidance, Estimote’s new features can provide businesses with more granular info about shopper or visitor behavior. Tracking a visitor’s path through an establishment can provide literal path analysis, especially if a business is using other Estimote features to track engagement with certain displays, purchase conversion and more.

Estimote is trying to own the beacon hardware/platform space, and this is another step towards that goal. Launch partners include Cisco and other big name players, so they appear to be doing something right for now.

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Estimote Opens a New Frontier for App Design: Indoor Locations

Estimote’s new indoor location app makes it easy for devs to build on top of beacons’ promise. Estimote

Smartphones are dumbest when it comes to the world immediately surrounding them. Think about it: The miracle device in your pocket can summon up any fact you could conceivably want to know about Dunkin’ Donuts, and it can instantly render a map of every Dunkin’ Donuts in your greater metropolitan area, but as to the fact that you’re actually, physically standing in line at Dunkin’ Donuts, it’s utterly oblivious.

That won’t likely be the case for long. A new generation of sensors, powered by a low-energy flavor of Bluetooth, stand to give our phones a rich awareness of the physical world. One company leading the push is Estimote, which started shipping some of the first “beacons,” as the Bluetooth sensors are being called, around this time last year. Looking at how beacons have developed over the last 12 months, you can see a version of Moore’s Law at work. Estimote’s first beacons lived in plastic enclosures the size of rabbits’ feet. Its newest ones, debuted earlier this month, take the form of stickers, small enough to be placed not just on walls but individual objects.

Estimote’s kept busy making beacons available to pretty much whoever wants to play with them. The company doesn’t know what the killer app for beacons will be, and it’s content to leave it up to designers and developers to figure it out. But in addition to making its tiny Bluetooth radios smaller and smarter, Estimote’s also keen to give people simple ways to harness that technology’s promise. Its latest offering is an app that lets developers build products based around indoor location, using beacons to pinpoint a device’s location in space down to a few feet.

The tech world has been circling indoor location with interest for years. Google’s steadily been charting airports, malls and the like. Last year, Apple spent $20 million on a startup that uses Wi-Fi signals to triangulate indoor location.

Beacons offer another way to orient mobile devices indoors, and Estimote’s new app is specifically designed to let developers explore that potential. The idea was to bring an “it just works” accessibility to indoor location. It will play nice with any of the company’s existing, rabbit’s foot sized beacons (which it’s referring to as “enterprise” grade beacons, as opposed to the new sticker-size variety). The app takes care of all the messiness of calibration and setup, showing developers how to place beacons around a room for ideal coverage and automatically adjusting all the necessary settings related to stuff like broadcast intervals and power management. Then, the it spits out code that developers can paste right into applications of their own.

The new app helps with all the setup and calibration. Estimote

By radically streamlining the setup process, Estimote hopes to encourage experimentation. As Steve Cheney, Estimote’s co-founder and head of business, points out, today’s mobile operating systems serve up outdoor location information on a platter. Indoor positioning is far thornier territory. For WiFi-based approaches, it requires having direct access to the site’s hardware. And doing beacon-based location from scratch can be a huge undertaking—Cheney says it took one developer nine months to build his own algorithms for tracking smartphones in a mall setting.

Though this first version of Estimote’s indoor location framework will only work in smaller venues, the idea was to lower the barrier for entry. Estimote’s currently working directly with venues, design studios, and big-name companies who are excited about indoor location, but the new app lets anyone get in on the action. “We’re extending indoor positioning to venue owners and developers of any size,” Cheney says, “and it’s not predicated on the operating system doing anything.”

Indoor positioning opens up all sorts of new possibilities for app design, with new interactions and behaviors informed by fine-grained location data. If the current state of smart home technology lets you program your Philips Hue light bulbs to turn on when you’re in a 100-meter GPS bubble around your house, Estimote’s indoor location is the sort of thing that could make them light and dim fluidly as you move from room to room. As Jakub Krzych, Estimote’s CEO and co-founder explains, it will let designers work with physical space in all new ways. “Think of it like back in the 1980’s when, after the Apple Macintosh introduced the mouse to the world, developers had a whole new realm of possibilities with which to program,” he says. “This time you and your smartphone are the cursor and the physical world is your canvas.”

Still, it’s far from clear what the killer app for indoor location will be. Beacons have steadily appeared in the real world without exactly redefining our mobile experience. One early adopter was Major League Baseball, which blanketed ballparks with the tiny radios to help offer seat upgrades and location-specific concessions specials. Department stores like Macy’s will soon be using beacons to send personalized deals to smartphone users.

The new sticker form factor beacons. Estimote

Getting bombarded with virtual coupons, even if they’re tailored to you and the product you’re looking at, isn’t an especially thrilling prospect, and even Cheney readily admits that he isn’t sure what the slam dunk use case will be. At the very least, he sees potential to smooth out many of the countless interactions we do day in and day out, especially surrounding identification and authentication. “You do a lot of things deliberately,” he says. “You take your phone out and check it. You take your key out and unlock the door. If you just charted what you did from waking up today to where you are now, you’ve probably done a lot of these specific, deliberate actions. And the mobile device, given more context, is going to be more and more capable of autonomously doing these things for you, or enabling you to confirm you’re the person you say you are.”

Beyond that, it gets harder to see exactly what it looks like when our phones know exactly where we are inside as well as out. Cheney throws out a scenario where you’d put in an order for a double latte on the Dunkin’ Donuts app on your phone, and, thanks to beacons, the person behind the counter could start making it right when you actually get there, ensuring that it’s fresh when you pick it up. Taking smartphone-assisted food ordering to even more elaborate levels of choreography probably isn’t anyone’s idea of a truly transformational technology. But it’s early yet. You could argue that Uber was the real killer app for GPS, and yet for years we were clutching our phones in one hand and hailing cabs with the other.

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