This Startup’s Cheap Sensors Could Create an OS for Everyday Life
wired.com
wired.com
I do a lot of Retail & IT Consulting and this is very interesting to me. What other use cases did you have in mind that you haven't posted on your website?
You website states it will ship this Summer, with Summer nearly over - is this still the case?
Really looking forward to offering this to my Retail clients and working with your team on implementations.
We are extremely focused on the retail and believe that you have to provide users with a context and not to annoy them. Better shopping in IKEA or product search and navigation in Walmart are the obvious solutions.
There are more specialized application - check e.g www.swirl.com they focus mostly on fashion stores or shopkick.com focused on rewards and using audio beacons.
If you pre-order beacons now will ship this Monday and you will have an access to our SDK and source code of sample apps. Please note the Apple iBeacon profile is not public yet, but our beacons have over-the-air update feature so you will be able to update it using your phone whenever Apple or Google beacon profile is ready.
We posted also a simple hack explaining how to turn iOS6 device into a beacon, so you could actually start experimenting now: http://blog.estimote.com/post/57087873876/a-simple-way-to-si...
The hard thing to do as a retail operation is to use this in a way that provides real value. The last thing that I want as a consumer is another interaction on par with SMS messaging. But, if this allowed the retailer to gather information on the consumers wants and needs and provided valuable information back to the consumer that enhanced the shopping experience, it could be amazing.
I think it is smart to start with retail, but this has applications all over the place. I think the price point is extremely important. But once the price comes down and consumers and businesses can afford to purchase many of these, we will see many cool applications. If this was matched up with an easy way to program them, like IFTTT, home adoption would take off. It could really change the face of home automation.
In short, I'm excited and have preordered.
If you go browsing for other furnitures some of them like a pillow might notify you that it fits to the sofa you have in the cart.
No more wooden pencils and obscure Swedish names you need to write down :P We posted a blog post about it http://blog.estimote.com/post/57087827916/wooden-pencils-are...
I'm picturing the scenario where you're waiting for the sale rep to get free to ring you up and poking around the store in the meantime.
Can we generate a heat map for the sales guy so he knows what you were looking at in the display racks? That would be pretty awesome.
Imagine you walked into a larger store, for example Walmart. As you walk in, the estimote app loads the wallmart app temporarily over the instore wifi. The app shows you a map of the store, which shows what products can be bought in which aisle, making your shopping experience much faster. As you approach the cash register, it acts like a concierge and tells you which register is the fastest one (some airports do this with a dedicated person, which directs people to different lines. It yields considerable speed ups). As you leave the store, the walmart app is removed from your phone. Estimote now shows you the nearest estimote enabled stores.
That's the good scenario. Now to the bad.
You go to the mall. As you approach it, you phone starts buzzing like it's mad. You think it's a call, so you pick up your phone. Nope, its Footlocker trying to sell you their new line of shoes at a 10% discount. Fine, but you're not looking for shoes. As you walk through the mall, your phone goes of wantonly, displaying ads for stores that are on the other side of the mall. Obviously, they don't know how to configure their estimotes. You can't walk for 5 meters without an estimote alert going off, logging itself to your allready estimote infested task list. Completely pissed off, you turn off your phone in order to leave the mall at peace. You're not buying stuff here. As you get home, you get an important call, but your phone is off, and you miss it. Resignated, you trash your iphone and get yourself a single purpose nokia. Serves you right estimote, serves your right.
I think there's certainly potential behind these, but their "sell the dev packs" approach to it doesn't seem to be very promising. Most small retailers will struggle with the setup and SDK. Hell, the local supermarkets cash registers here have SQL injection vunerabilities. One bar code that includes ;DROP TABLE * in it and they're closed for a week.
There seem to be several steps in setting these up. 1. Buying them. 2. Setting them up physically. 3. ? Linking them to a central system ? 4. Writing an app.
Out of these points, it seems they are only covering 1, even though there's certainly work involved (and money to be made) in steps 2 - 4 . Dumping these on the buyer leads to friction in the buying process which will cost them sales. They need to sort that out.
Only the specific apps that you choose to install will be able to communicate with particular beacons, so if one starts to annoy you with spammy behaviour you can easily remove it from your phone and forget about it.
By making customers download individual apps, your product becomes harder to implement/less profitable for stores which do not have an app with broad customer adoption. That makes you miss out on the long tail, which in this case could be considerable.
The locationally dependent browsing over in store wifi doesn't have this downside. It could leverage exsisting web technology, which makes the development off these apps a lot easier. It might work like this:
1. You walk into the beacon range. The beacon sends you the url: int.somestore.com/locationx?val=123094&locationy?val=594952&locationz=40389 2. It sends you the connection data for the internal wifi which serves up the stores webapplication. 3. The webapp is shown in the estimote app. 4. Profit.
When it comes to the signal/noise problem it is definately a challenge and we believe that neither App Stores nor Estimote as beacons' infrastructure will allow apps that annoy consumers because it will kill the technology and users will turn off the Bluetooth.
Our vision of future interactions is more about context. We believe the cocept of apps you have to download and place as an icon on your screen and then find when you need is wrong.
It should work the way that you walk-in to the your home approache fridge with smartphone or Google Glass and wanted order for eggs, you take out your phone and there is a fridge context.
You walk-in to the restaurant and there is a context of menu and ordering food. You ate and there is a context of payin the bill, you walk-out and in the exit there is a conxtext of rating the restaurant.
So, in our vision future apps will be a set of conditions and actions you write for the venue the same way you do it now for the screen and keyboard.
From technology point of view if some popular app like Foursquare integreta with our beacons it could trigger other apps even if they not have our code yet, but there is a context for that.
Are these kind of sensors/receivers available in such commercially available versions that they can be easily incorporated into robotic projects? It seems like this could be used for a robot "homing in" to a position -- such as a charging station.
there are several approaches to Bluetooth Low Energy beacons. Project called Tail (http://www.thetileapp.com/) is building sensors that you attach to products and when they move or are lost your smartphone can use the Bluetooth radio signals to detect its proximity.
Our www.estimote.com beacons are designed to be placed in a fixed location such as retail store, museum or park. They broadcast their location to all the phones or devices (like your robot) in the range.
The devices could pickup the signal and estimate the location very precisely, down to inches - so it is definitely a technology that could be used to indoor-navigation for robots, machines in the factory or doctors in a hospital.
We at Estimote are focused on retail, but we also have an API and presale Dev Kits, so anybody could experiment with the technology.
Shoot me an email jakub at estimote.com and will be more than happy to advice on how to use it for robots.
There has been a _lot_ of research in this area that I have seen and almost everything seems to ignore multipath propagation. I think the more interesting approach is fusing RF localization with other sensors (example paper [pdf warning for those fearful of them] https://smartech.gatech.edu/bitstream/handle/1853/37074/perv... )
Just wanting to point out that it is much more complicated than simply picking up the signal and homing in.
We believe the whole indoor-navigation idea is wrong. There is no need to map every inch of the physical world and get X,Y coordinates.
It's all about the context and placing tiny beacons in the doors, next to check-out, next to GoPro camera in the Best Buy.
They you detect the proximity and the context and trigger an action.
Of course if you would like to navigate down to inches and get X,Y you could just narrow the range of beacons and stick as many as possible - you will be very accurate and the multipath propagation is not an issue.
Passive UHF RFID tags are nice for a number of reasons: super-low tag cost (sub-$0.10 in bulk), long range (6+ meters), and lack of a battery (tags harvest wireless power from a reader). Bluetooth solutions will have a hard time competing with UHF RFID on these properties -- and that's key for certain applications. However, there are definitely benefits to an alternative solution like wireless triangulation. For example, even the best UHF tag localization algorithms produce error bounds on the order of 0.5 meters (there are workarounds for mobile robots). Plus, the Bluetooth solution doesn't require the reader to be mobile -- you can take a single measurement and get a decent pose estimate.
I still share a lot of your concerns: if this is using triangulation, you'll need multiple base stations (ie. infrastructure costs); many similar systems require extensive calibration; and the effects of multipath, diffusion, and fading can be very tricky to characterize.
As for mapping... SLAM mapping using ultra-low cost laser rangefinders [2] is nearing triviality, and even onboard visual SLAM is becoming imminently feasible. Anyway... happy to speak more offline. My contact info is easy to find.
[1] More details: http://www.travisdeyle.com/publications.html
[2] http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/12/20/ultra-low-cost-laser-r...
Funny story... before (and after) doing higher-level robot behaviors, I worked on low-level reader hardware too (with our mutual colleague, I presume). Most recently, it was building SDRs to interact with super-high datarate passive tags with onboard sensors... to build cyborg dragonflies [3].
[1] http://ros.org/wiki/hrl_rfid
[2] http://www.ros.org/wiki/pr2_rfid
[3] http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/06/dragonfly-backpack...
I'm also thinking about the typical user case scenario where it would require for me to go to settings->bluetooth-> and connect. Seems like too much of a hassle for the average person, or does iBeacon in iOS 7 solve this issue by not having to "connect"?
I think you are confusing old Bluetooth we used for headsets or car audio and the new Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy protocol.
It is new, completely redesigned protocol that is supported by Apple devices from iPhone 4S and is more similar to Zigbee than Bluetooth.
Users still need to turn it on, but have measured in retail stores that most of "normal" people (not geeks) do not turn it off. Please also note the Bluetooth Low Energy is used and promoted by Apple in features like AirDrop or to communicate with Apple TV.
Bluetooth Low Energy different than old Bluetooth does not require pairing and connecting.
You just walk-in to the store, e.g. IKEA and approach sofa you like the most and you see the picture of the sofa on your screen.
Blueooth SIG (organization behind Bluetooth standard) projects strong growth in the number of devices that support BLE: http://blog.bluetooth.com/os-season-what-it-means-to-you/
You cool kids with your "new" bluetooth.
It'd be interesting to see what the security ramifications are of having a thirdparty broadcast content directly onto your phone. Pin lock stealer anyone?
We are sure there will be lots of marketing people trying to use this technology as a SPAM tool, but we believe that Apple with the the new iOS7 and the feature called iBeacon solve it in an elegant way. It's still under the NDA, but there are some publications about it: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1597348
With cheap and tiny Bluetooth Low Energy beacons the accuracy could be down to inches. So it's about you being at the front-door, at the check-out, in front of the mirror, next to sofa bed in the furniture store, etc.
It's much more precise, thus the context for the app on the phone could be better and the experience almost magical.
And also Bluetooth Low Energy is fully supported by major phone companies (http://blog.bluetooth.com/os-season-what-it-means-to-you/) so BLE beacons like our motes could trigger different actions based on your location even if your phone is in the pocket.
You can't do it with Wi-Fi and AP infrastructure and since the beacons are wireless, cheap and easy to install there will be eventually new infrastructure build.