Reality matters

About a year ago we began shipping our first product, Estimote Beacons. Since then, we’ve grown an incredible global network of over 25,000 developers building applications on top of Estimote. Startups and Fortune 500 companies alike use our platform to build apps that change how we interact with the world around us - from shopping malls, to the office, to museums, to concerts and beyond.

Today we’re extremely excited to launch Estimote Stickers, brand new super tiny beacons that represent the future of what sensor technology and contextual computing will be.

We’re accepting

pre-orders for Sticker Development Kits now

and will begin shipping in late October. Each $99 Dev Kit contains ten stickers with a default battery life of approximately one year. Estimote Stickers are fully backwards compatible with our SDKs and apps, as well as Estimote Cloud.

Estimote Stickers are complementary to Estimote Beacons. Whereas beacons add a layer of contextual intelligence to static locations such as stores, museums and airports, stickers extend that context to the objects within those venues. Stickers contain accelerometer and temperature sensors and an optimized ARM processor with flash memory and Bluetooth Smart controller, all inside a significantly smaller and thinner form factor. Stickers are truly designed to be placed on everyday objects. Simply attach a sticker to an item to turn it into a nearable - a smart, connected object that broadcasts data about its location, motion and temperature.

For instance, pick up the latest bestseller in your local bookstore and your phone will automatically display reviews. Try on a jacket in-store and watch the shelf display update with available style options and which purse matches best. Or even tag a sticker to a bottle of chardonnay in your fridge to be notified when it’s cooled to exactly the right temperature.

Estimote is introducing the term nearable as an intelligent object linked by a smart beacon with a rich SDK to the cloud. Estimote Stickers will be pre-programmed with nearable-specific context and an upcoming new version of our SDK with a higher level of abstraction.

This SDK will give developers tools to classify objects—for example, which objects around me do I own? Which are in motion? As a developer you shouldn’t have to listen to the UUID and measure a distance given to you as RSSI, but instead have a model that helps you implicitly declare much more about the physical world.

For example if you build an electronic leash app for attaching an Estimote Sticker to your dog, you assign the nearable as a moving object which you own. Is it hot outside? Maybe your dog needs more water as she’s moved more today than yesterday.

You will be able to access default object classes (interaction, motion, ownership, type of object) or set up your own behavior and access other classes or methods as a developer — e.g, the motion sensor on a purse should trigger different actions than the motion sensor on a sticker attached to your dog.

By knowing the type of the object, better tools can be provided at the platform level to interact with those objects. Of course developers can create other gestures dynamically responding to the proximity of various objects. And all of this code can be uploaded to Github and shared with the community! It will be faster and easier than ever to build contextually aware apps on top of beacons. Nearables are the future of sensor technology, a vision shared by our partners already beta testing the new product:

“iBeacon has the potential to enrich our in-venue experience forever. The convergence between BLE solutions like iBeacon and core networking technologies like Wi-Fi are happening rapidly. We’ve enjoyed working with Estimote Beacons to help unify middleware services like network management and application services like indoor positioning. We’re super excited about Estimote Nearables, as they represent an opportunity to bring truly mobile context to location based services.” - Pritam Shah, Engineering Director at Cisco Systems, Wireless Networking Group

Beta partners for Estimote Stickers include Cisco, IDEO, the Guggenheim Museum, Adobe’s Behance, Prolific Interactive, and Robin, with additional significant partners using them under NDA.

Pre-order your Estimote Stickers now. We can’t wait to see what you build!

Your thoughts are extremely important to us, so don’t hesitate to share them. Email us or let us know on Facebook and Twitter what you think about Estimote Stickers. And don’t forget to tell us what objects you’re planning to turn into nearables!