iBeacon Pioneers Estimote (YC S13) Raise $3.1M Seed Round

iBeacon Pioneers Estimote (YC S13) Raise $3.1M Seed Round(techcrunch.com)

66 points by ljdk 12 years ago | 32 comments

cmollis 12 years ago |

Estimotes are nice for production, but we built testing beacons out of Raspberry Pi's

http://developer.radiusnetworks.com/2013/10/09/how-to-make-a...

Here's a link the source for an app that we wrote for a Party that we threw recently..

https://github.com/backofthecup/HolidayParty

We built a few D3 visualizations of where users were at the party, and how fast they found hidden iBeacons... kind of like a treasure hunt game to demo the technology.

post_break 12 years ago | |

Can you explain how the device works? What does my phone do when it picks up this iBeacon?

cmollis 12 years ago | | |

If you've implemented the location callbacks for a specific region (defined by a UUID), then you'll receive messages with that detail how far you are from the device (within about 70m, depending on your device). Depending on the device, the power settings, etc, this can be very accurate.. to < 1m. The IOS api's also support background processing so the app doesn't necessarily need to be in the foreground to process. You will get called back when you enter and exit regions.

kkwok 12 years ago | |

Would love to see the visualizations!

pclark 12 years ago |

Congrats Estimotes! I have their beacons sitting on my desk. I can't speak for the capabilities yet – but the design is gorgeous

alexatkeplar 12 years ago | |

They're sitting on my desk too! :-) https://twitter.com/SnowPlowData/status/409999490192396289

hustlechris 12 years ago | | |

Nice! Coded anything yet?

ljdk 12 years ago | |

Thanks! Capabilities live up to the design, at least :)

hustlechris 12 years ago | |

Thanks! What are you billing with them?

xauronx 12 years ago |

I'm excited to see where this goes. I was recently on a team for the Salesforce Hackathon that created a pretty cool rewards and consumer statistics platform. Earn points for visiting, get a push notification when you receive a reward, etc. Awesome for the consumer. The business owner gets statistics based on foot traffic, peak hours, most visited beacons, etc.

We didn't have any iBeacons handy (only 5 days between idea and completion), so we were using an iPad to broadcast an "iBeacon". It was pretty neat. I'd like to get my hands on some of Estimotes beacons.

ljdk 12 years ago | |

Hey, I'm Lukasz, CTO at Estimote, I'd love to take a look—please drop us a line!

xauronx 12 years ago | | |

Email sent!

mandeepj 12 years ago |

I was reading about how iBeacon will revolutionize contact less payments but when I read about square wallet, I thought this is already done without any need of iBeacon.

Thoughts? Am I missing anything here?

kloncks 12 years ago | |

Have you used Square Wallet yet?

Experience is awful. It is thought that BLE might be better tech that leads to a better experience.

lambda 12 years ago | | |

Based on this paper, I'm not sure I'd want to rely on something like BLE for payments: http://0b4af6cdc2f0c5998459-c0245c5c937c5dedcca3f1764ecc9b2f...

ljdk 12 years ago |

Also, here's a short video showing what's possible: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrsHBjzt2E8

hustlechris 12 years ago | |

Nice! Should be in the article BTW.

maffydub 12 years ago |

Congratulations to the Estimote guys! I've borrowed one of these to test out their signal strength/consistency.

(At a recent AngelHack, I built an indoor-positioning system based on triangulation of signal strength. I tested with a StickNFind BLE device and a couple of homemade BLE(-ish) devices based on nRF24L01 RF modules. I'm hoping the signal strength from the Estimote is going to be more consistent than these.)

andrewtbham 12 years ago | |

I got some estimotes and my experience is that the signal strength doesn't change consistently based on the distance. I was planning to do a program using trilateration... but I don't think it would work.

maffydub 12 years ago | | |

My experience was that the RSSI does change reasonably consistently, but that there's quite a lot of noise (so you need to smooth it appropriately). I also get the impression that it's affected by orientation of the phone relative to the beacon, and also by anything blocking line-of-sight (including humans). Mounting the beacons high up could reduce the effect of this last point.

tlack 12 years ago | |

Let me know how accurate you can get your system. I was planning something similar but with the broad ranges offered by BluetoothLE/iBeacon I didn't expect to get much accuracy out of the system.

boobear19 12 years ago | |

I too have been working on triangulation - any code you can share?

maffydub 12 years ago | | |

The code I have is at https://github.com/matt-williams/blook8r.

My trilateration code isn't great - I tried doing it properly and couldn't get it working in the 24 hours of the hackathon. Positioning along a 1D line using signal strength from two beacons was much simpler and I implemented this and then bodged in a third beacon using some averaging.

anuraj 12 years ago |

Congrats Estimote - We recently got the developer pack and implemented an Android SDK for the same, and the motes are handy. The calibration is a bit off for each mote, and thus location accuracy is a bit compromised. Hope the production version will be better calibrated.

We also have a similar SDK that works over indoor WiFi, though the accuracy is definitely better for the BLE beacon.

ljdk 12 years ago | |

Thanks! You may try increasing the broadcasting power of each beacon to get better accuracy. Also, we're working on our Android SDK so please stay tuned.

mortenjorck 12 years ago |

The potential applications are fascinating, but I'm getting a new picture of the thought behind Apple's addition of Control Center in iOS 7: The Bluetooth toggle isn't just there for a modicum of battery conservation. Sometimes you'll welcome iBeacons; other times you'll want to keep them at arm's length.

applecore 12 years ago | |

With fine-grained control over an individual app's behavior, do we need an all-or-nothing Bluetooth setting to control how they use iBeacons?

hustlechris 12 years ago | | |

Yeah, super curious as to what Apple is cooking in that department, I'm sure they are thinking about it a lot. For now their policy is just to OPT-IN by downloading relevant app and giving it permissions, you will not get spammed by beacons for which you didn't download relevant app.

hustlechris 12 years ago | |

Yeah, next 6 months we'll gonna see how the whole privacy angle plays out. Interesting times.

mojuba 12 years ago |

Placed an order 2 months ago, still waiting...

eunoia 12 years ago | |

Same here