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

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

#21

Post by xauronx »

ljdk wrote: post #16
xauronx wrote: post #13

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 i…

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

Email sent!

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

#22

Post by ljdk »

anuraj wrote: post #20

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.

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.

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

#23

Post by post_break »

cmollis wrote: post #18

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…

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

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

#24

Post by dexone »

hustlechris wrote: post #15
applecore wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

The recent iBeacon update to the Apple Store iOS app may hint at how Apple wants apps to behave. Basically, it's strictly opt-in, with copious information about the benefits, and obviously, possibility to turn the in-store notification off. I suppose in the future, as the customers get acquainted with the technology, there won't be the need to spell out the benefits, but the opt-in and strict user control are here to stay.

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

#25

Post by cmollis »

post_break wrote: post #23
cmollis wrote: post #18

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…

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

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.

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

#26

Post by kkwok »

cmollis wrote: post #18

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…

Would love to see the visualizations!

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

#28

Post by andrewtbham »

maffydub wrote: post #14

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.)

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.

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

#29

Post by boobear19 »

maffydub wrote: post #14

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.)

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

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

#30

Post by kloncks »

mandeepj wrote: post #27

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?

Have you used Square Wallet yet?

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

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