Estimote’s new indoor location app makes it easy for devs to build on top of beacons’ promise. Estimote
Smartphones are dumbest when it comes to the world immediately surrounding them. Think about it: The miracle device in your pocket can summon up any fact you could conceivably want to know about Dunkin’ Donuts, and it can instantly render a map of every Dunkin’ Donuts in your greater metropolitan area, but as to the fact that you’re actually, physically standing in line at Dunkin’ Donuts, it’s utterly oblivious.
That won’t likely be the case for long. A new generation of sensors, powered by a low-energy flavor of Bluetooth, stand to give our phones a rich awareness of the physical world. One company leading the push is Estimote, which started shipping some of the first “beacons,” as the Bluetooth sensors are being called, around this time last year. Looking at how beacons have developed over the last 12 months, you can see a version of Moore’s Law at work. Estimote’s first beacons lived in plastic enclosures the size of rabbits’ feet. Its newest ones, debuted earlier this month, take the form of stickers, small enough to be placed not just on walls but individual objects.
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