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

http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/10/ibeacon-pioneers-estimote-raise-3-1m-seed-round/

by ljdk • 13 years ago

66 32 13 years ago

pclark• 13 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

hustlechris5• 13 years ago

Thanks! What are you billing with them?

alexatkeplar• 13 years ago

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

hustlechris5• 13 years ago

Nice! Coded anything yet?

ljdk4• 13 years ago

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

mortenjorck• 13 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.

hustlechris5• 13 years ago

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

applecore• 13 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?

hustlechris5• 13 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.

ljdk4• 13 years ago

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

hustlechris5• 13 years ago

Nice! Should be in the article BTW.

xauronx2• 13 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.

ljdk4• 13 years ago

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

xauronx2• 13 years ago

Email sent!

maffydub3• 13 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• 13 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.

maffydub3• 13 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.

boobear19• 13 years ago

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

maffydub3• 13 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.

tlack• 13 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.

mojuba• 13 years ago

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

eunoia• 13 years ago

Same here

cmollis2• 13 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• 13 years ago

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

cmollis2• 13 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• 13 years ago

Would love to see the visualizations!

anuraj• 13 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.

ljdk4• 13 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.

mandeepj• 13 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• 13 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• 13 years ago

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

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

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