jimiasty

You are definitely right and there are technology limitation just to stick 3 sensors and triangulate the signal.

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.

There is wide variety of applications from proximity marketing, indoor-navigation, automatic check-in, contact-less payments till home automation, public transportation, etc.

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 retail applications are very obvious - imagine you walk in to IKEA and approach sofa you like the post. You want to buy it, so you take a phone out of your pocket, unlock it and BAM - so you the picture of the sofa, you could add it to the cart or read more about it.

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...

Sure, but in 2002 there was no iPhone and apps that could handle the Bluetooth signal and trigger different actions. There was also no centralized App Store which could protect users and ensure the the quality.

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

There is indeed an approach to locate phones based on the signales from Wi-Fi routers. The challenge is its accuracy which is not better than 6-10 metres - so it's you are in this room or in the other room.

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.

Hi Matti,

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.

This is Estimote (YC S13) co-founder here. The contextual micro-location based interactions triggered by the presence of Bluetooth Beacons is something called iBeacon and will be part of iOS7 this Fall. Since it is still under NDA those who have an Apple Developer Account could access sample codes in the Apple SDK. For those who would like to experiment already and check the possibilities we have also published a blog post explaining how to turn one iOS6 device intro a virtual beacon and use the other to experiment with micro-location: http://blog.estimote.com/post/57087873876/a-simple-way-to-si...