Estimote
- Just raised over $3.1M
- It’s just BLE advertising. It does nothing but exposes specific major and minor ID’s of the thing you want to identify
- The app does all the work. Upon retrieving the associated ID, it can give context-aware information to the user
- This is the market NFC wanted to target, and it’s getting marginalized by BLE
- Uses Nordic nRF51822 + accelerometer
- Apple introduced iBeacon, which gave Estimote a boost
- Device like Estimote does not give any access to the attached accelerometer
- In fact, BLE devices with pre-flashed firmware limits the user interaction with the hardware pretty significantly
http://makezine.com/2014/01/03/reverse-engineering-the-estimote (Sandeep co-authored)