Reality matters

It’s been almost a year since we first began shipping Estimote Beacons around the world. We’ve shipped to dozens of countries and to startups and Fortune 500 customers alike. Indeed, we’re shipping dev kits and bulk orders daily.

In the early months, our focus was on getting hardware in the hands of hackers. We knew that you were eager to test ideas, prototype concepts and ultimately, add contextual computing to your apps. The goal wasn’t to ship perfect product, but rather to enable you with the best and easiest hardware and software to get going.

With the early days of iBeacon behind us, we know our offering must evolve with the market. We recognize that what our community needs today isn’t what it needed last year, or even last month. It’s why we’re doubling down on our engineering efforts—across hardware, firmware, mobile and cloud—to build the products, tools and services that will empower a global community of developers to build the best contextual computing apps and experiences.

Introducing power management

We’ve listened to your feedback and understand that battery life is one of the most critical concerns when considering a beacon deployment. One of the compelling advantages of bluetooth sensors is how they can extend the intelligence of the network edge using a tiny battery operated device. If you need to plug a beacon into a wall outlet, its utility is immediately limited in any real world environment. It’s imperative that you can trust that your beacons will work, work well, and work for a very long time. This is why, as of May, we began shipping beacons with a 70% larger battery and a more energy efficient default configuration.

But we’re not stopping there. Today we’re incredibly excited to announce a brand new Estimote iOS app (version 2.4) that features the most advanced power management capabilities on the market. In fact, this marks the first rollout of power management software in the world. The new feature, called Power Modes, does a lot of intricate work under the hood, but the end result is your beacons will both last longer and be smarter. And every beacon we’ve ever shipped can be updated to the current firmware version (2.1) over the air and immediately take advantage of these power savings modes. This extensibility is unparalleled in the beacon market.

Our embedded and systems engineers have worked for thousands of hours optimizing every packet in the Bluetooth stack and have devised several new schemes to extend the life of an Estimote Beacon measurably. We abstract 100% of this from developers and expose this neatly in both our mobile app and SDK for you to manage. And this is simply the first release in a series of power management features due out from us. We believe that pretty soon a beacon will be able to last forever, powering millions of interactions as consumers move about their journey through the physical world, and we want to be the first company to get there.

How to use Power Modes

After connecting to a particular beacon via the Estimote app, you can now turn on two beacon Power Modes: Basic and/or Smart. Basic Power mode prolongs the life of the beacon by about 30 percent, regardless of the broadcasting power and advertising interval settings. In this mode, direct connection to your beacons might be slightly slower, but we believe this lifetime tradeoff is desirable in applications where establishing a connection to the beacon is infrequent.

Smart Power uses state-of-the-art adaptive algorithms to understand how you use your beacons, and applies this data to optimize power usage to suit your needs. Your Estimote Beacon will automatically learn your use case and its environment—how many devices are nearby at certain times, for instance—to intelligently adjust its power consumption. In our comprehensive testing, this mode easily saved an additional 50 percent of power. We’ll also be releasing the ability to schedule your beacons’ broadcast hours soon, for instance turning them “off” at night if your location is closed.

You can choose to operate the two modes separately or turn both on at once. We recommend testing both modes to see which works best for you.

A better radar

Power Modes aren’t the only new functionality we’ve introduced in this update. The radar view inside our mobile apps—a fundamental part of the user interface—is now much more stable. Beacons won’t blink on the screen anymore; if a beacon is detected in a given zone, it will remain on screen until you change proximity zones. This should make connecting to specific beacons much smoother.

This improvement is a precursor to several new features due out in the coming weeks centered on “fleet management.” Now that our customers are deploying hundreds and thousands of beacons at once, we’ll be providing a suite of tools and API’s to remotely manage your beacons in bulk.

Easier UUID management

We’ve also made some enhancements to UUID management. Now, a beacon’s assigned name is visible in the Estimote app and not just via Estimote Cloud. Understanding which beacon is associated to which part of your space just became much easier.

An end to end solution

From Estimote’s inception over two years ago, we’ve been committed to providing the best combination of hardware and software to ignite the contextual computing revolution. Our integrated products and complete ownership of every aspect of the product and production process gives us a unique ability to deliver truly magical experiences for mobile designers and developers. Tightly coupled software and hardware is the difference between a commodity and a differentiated product.

As we pass the one year anniversary of Apple’s announcement of iBeacon in June 2013, we’re incredibly excited to be supporting over 20,000 developers like you in creating a new wave of mobile innovation. Commodity beacons aren’t enough; we’re collaborating closely with folks like you—inside both startups and the biggest brands in the world—to create a platform and full suite of services on top of beautifully designed hardware. Whether it’s middleware services like security and power management, analytics endpoints which we launched last month, or application services on top of the beacon network which we’re building now, Estimote is determined to provide developers with the tools they need to surf the contextual computing wave.

You can download the new app right now. You also need your beacons’ updated to firmware 2.1 (if you haven’t done that yet) which can be done over the air. Give the new Power Modes a try, and let us know what you think. We love your feedback and are always listening. You can always reach us @Estimote or drop our community managers a line.