BLE based startups

Start-up companies playing around with BLE
When Robert Schoble mentioned about context awareness platform in his book “age of context ”. There has been increased interest in BLE based application. The avenues where one can deploy and use iBeacon are tremendous, viz

1. Retail
2. Hospital
3. Tourism
4. Museums
5. Airports
6. Healthcare
7. Automobile
8. Outdoor navigation

I have been tracking this field for a while and lot of start-ups have popped up designing their own BLE enabled beacons and providing marketing , proximity based services on top of them.

1. Estimote , USA/Poland http://estimote.com $99

2. Qualcomm, Gimbal
   https://www.gimbal.com/

3. Radius Network, USA
   http://www.radiusnetworks.com/
   Provides iBeacon development kit based on raspberry pi $99.99 for 1 iBeacon dev kit
   Make your own http://developer.radiusnetworks.com/2013/10/09/how-to-make-an-ibeacon-out-of-a-raspberry-pi.html
   $149.99 for dual iBeacon kit
   RadBeacon as USB
   Desktop app for beacon

4. Urban Airship , USA
   http://urbanairship.com/

5. Rainmaker Labs, Singapore
   http://getbleep.com/

6. Sensorberg, Europe
   http://www.sensorberg.com/#
   Mini Beacon Starter Kit - with 3 iBeacons €89.00

7. Inmarket
   http://www.inmarket.com/ USA

8. Proxima
   http://www.proxima.io

There has been sudden up-rise of BLE based hardware companies, and retail shops and other segments jumping in the bandwagon. Still technology is in experimental phase and much needs to be seen and done. Especially integrating the payment part of retail experience.

• Paypal is coming up with BLE based beacon which will be helping in payments.

• BLE still remains the competitive tech to NFC, lot of companies and consortium have already launch mobile wallet applications based on NFC.

• Apple next step? coming up with an mobile wallet based on NFC ? Last known estimote was planning to use temperature sensors in their beacons, may be they have a plan for payments too.