Today we’re excited to announce the next big evolution of the Estimote platform: we’ve integrated Estimote Indoor Location, Estimote Stickers, and Estimote Cloud to unlock even more contextually-powered mobile experiences. With today’s release of our indoor location product, you can now see and search for nearables in specific locations, and soon you’ll be able to build your own apps on top of this infrastructure. We call this a location intelligence platform, and it takes a lot more than beacons to make it a reality.
The physical world truly is a canvas for the next generation of mobile apps. Download the updated Estimote Indoor Location app to experience the new features today.
An OS for the physical world
From the very beginning, our strategy has never been to be just a beacon company. Of course we do design and produce our own hardware, but it’s because we firmly believe the best way to deliver real value – for developers, enterprises, and end users – is with a tightly integrated full stack. As Alan Kay famously put it: “people who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” Our BLE beacon and sticker hardware is the foundational layer for our larger vision and goal: to build an operating system for the physical world. Every feature and product we ship brings us closer to a fantastic new future in which our smart devices are no longer blind to the world around us.
Estimote Indoor Location is a central component of building that future. Understanding a person’s position (micro-location) within a space, in an accurate and reliable way that is easy for developers to spin up, without excess overhead in calibration and setup, is a tremendous engineering challenge. But we’ve been up to it, investing heavily in location intelligence since shortly after we started shipping beacons. Tracking back to version 1 of our Indoor Location SDK in Fall 2014 we’ve continually released new improvements focusing on ongoing stability, accuracy, and scalability enhancements, as well as integration with Estimote Cloud to monitor locations via the web and see people in real time. Now, we’re adding nearables into the mix to bring together location context, the power of the cloud, and physical objects.
A location intelligence platform for people and objects
When we think of the future of location and context, we imagine the journey we go about in our daily lives, in busy office environments, in large retailers and even at home. What if the important objects in our home or office were always discoverable to us, or you could search on an app for the location of Black Friday specials when you arrive at the store?
Take the examples shown in the office environment in the video embedded in this post. We’re all familiar with the occasional frustrations of working in a busy office environment, where keeping track of your colleagues and your stuff can be a pain. Rather than walking all over to find your coworker for your upcoming meeting, imagine pulling out your smartphone to see her location in real-time. Turns out she’s lingering in the break room, but that’s okay because you can use that extra time to search for the projector since you see someone’s taken it from the conference room. Simply type HDMI Projector into your office app’s search box and voila, item located! All of this is possible today with the latest Estimote Indoor Location app.
If you’re in a public location (or one that belongs or has been shared with you), opening the app will automatically launch it into the location view, showing your position on the map along with the position of any other users and public nearables. Your own nearables will also be demarcated. And if there are any other locations in range, you can switch to viewing those in just two taps.
The most powerful feature of the new app is the ability to search for objects tagged with Estimote Stickers. Simply enter the name of a nearable and you’ll know exactly where it’s located. It’ll be highlighted on a map of the relevant location, as long as the location itself is either public or belongs to you.
How do we know a nearable’s position, you ask? This is where the magic of Estimote Cloud kicks in: any time a user of the Indoor Location app enters range of a sticker with the app in the foreground (background mode coming), that nearable’s position is saved in the cloud. It works even if the nearable is private. In this case it won’t be visible for anyone except the owner, but everyone will be still be passively updating its location.
We’ve made some other improvements to Estimote Cloud as well. You can log into your Estimote Account and access your mapped locations anytime. You’ll see if there are any people or nearables there. And now you can also edit the location. Just click Edit Floor Plan and use your mouse to drag and drop the corners. If you’re not satisfied with the map drawn by the Indoor Location app or SDK, you no longer have to map the room anew or adjust it programmatically with the SDK. Instead, now you can tailor the dimensions of the location to within centimeters for greater precision and stability.
What’s coming next?
Currently searching for nearables is available only in the Indoor Location app but we’re already working to bring it to the SDK as well. Just imagine how much power this unlocks for developers: a crowdsourced infrastructure of locations and objects, with all the data securely stored in the cloud. The applications are endless, from retail to museums to asset tracking in industrial and personal environments. And as for the nearables and stickers themselves…stay tuned for some exciting announcements very soon.
Want to start playing with beacons, nearables, and Estimote Indoor Location now? Perfect! Just download our app from iTunes and don’t forget to let us know how you like it. You can do that over email or by tweeting @Estimote. And if you don’t have your dev kit yet, grab one at Estimote.com.
Wojtek Borowicz, Community Evangelist at Estimote
Tanuj Parikh, Head of Business at Estimote
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