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

by ljdk on 12/10/13, 6:08 PM with 32 comments

• by cmollis on 12/10/13, 7:37 PM

  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.

• by pclark on 12/10/13, 6:33 PM

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

• by xauronx on 12/10/13, 7:12 PM

  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.

• by mandeepj on 12/10/13, 10:28 PM

  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?

• by ljdk on 12/10/13, 7:08 PM

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

• by maffydub on 12/10/13, 7:16 PM

  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.)

• by anuraj on 12/10/13, 7:59 PM

  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.

• by mortenjorck on 12/10/13, 6:42 PM

  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.

• by mojuba on 12/10/13, 7:28 PM

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