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After the introduction of the word iBeacon at the 2013 Apple World Wide Developer’s (WWDC) conference, 2014 was the year of big companies dipping their toe into beaconing radio wave technology. For NewAer it was exciting to see so many international players utilize the SDK we have been perfecting for 4-years; even better, it was truly a record-breaking year for our company as we deployed our all mobile platform compatible Proximity Platform, which turns any mobile device into a beacon. Our software developer kit makes iPhones, iPads and even the now-unsupported Windows XP machines that run most of the digital signs that you see in malls, stores and airports compatible with Bluetooth Low Energy, the protocol used by beacons.

Critics of the technology noted at this year’s Apple WWDC, there was no mention of iBeacon’s progress or status as a service. But there are plenty of opportunities and demand in the market – just take a look at few of the NewAer-enabled applications we launched with partners in 2014:

We flipped the assumed paradigm of iBeacon in July with Deutsche Telekom. Rather than positioning beacons within a space and interrupting users on their mobile phones, we applied 700 beacons to guests name badges at the T-Labs 10th anniversary party in Berlin, Germany. This became a record-setting number of iBeacons within a single space. Apple tablets running the NewAer Kiosk application read the iBeacon machine ID, then pulled user identity and information from a Deutsche Telekom owned database to bubble up relevant information at the right time to party goers in front of this signage. The tablets were connected to huge flat-panels around the event which made it truly interactive. This system has been engineered to be private and dynamically responsive and is also what we built the American Airlines airport signage upon during our in-air hackathon.

Klaus Wowereit Mayor of Berlin and Timotheus Höttges CEO Telekom showing the NewAer engine.

In September, we debuted the iPhone application “M-Pulse” with Unilever’s Magnum brand – a first peer-to-peer + iBeacon app of its kind. What made this application unique is friends who downloaded the app would be alerted when another friend was nearby via the same app, and they would be rewarded with free ice cream when an iBeacon was also found on any nearby Magnum cooler. We called it the digital ice-cream social, with a mission to connect people as part of Magnum’s 25th anniversary. Look for further rollouts of this technology in 2015 within the consumer product brand marketing space!

Also in September, @Stef debuted his Internet of Things inspired artwork “What do You Thing” based upon our platform. This OS-X application reads the radio signals our platform captures from wearables, Beacons, WiFi access points, printers and even older Bluetooth 2.0 devices to create a multi-dimensional visualization of the radio waves inside of a space. Look for more apps from Stef in the future on our platform!

@Stef and his visualization of the Internet of Things.

If you have ever read or posted on Craigslist Missed Connections, this next app is for you. The human herd naturally wants to connect, which is what our proximity platform can quickly enable as a low power and instant peer-to-peer machine layer. This fall, the application Cheekd launched using our framework to replay your social life based upon eligible bachelor and bachelorettes that you encounter during the day. When two people looking for a love connection get within a hundred feet of one another, their phones will let them know they are in range of a match based upon their configured preferences within the Cheekd application. It’s a magical experience and is powered by NewAer invisibly behind the scenes!

And finally, beacons got fun with Intel at their Global CEO Summit in October, with the debut of the Beacon Bar – where the Internet of Things is tagged to bottles of your favorite spirits interacting with tablets. The spirit type, mixer suggestions and number of times the liquor was poured all automatically appear on a bar mounted tablet. This is based on our Kiosk application, and is available for your company or next party. Let us know if your interested!

Bartender pours Seagram’s VO while the bar mounted tablet sees the beacon and automatically reacts.

If you are in Las Vegas for CES, come visit us at the Open Interconnect Consortium where we bring the Beacon Bar to Sin City. To get an invite, just use the Contact form or email us at partners at newaer.com and we will see you at our happy hour on Tuesday evening at the Bellagio, or schedule a time to meet during the week.

A huge thank you goes out to all of our innovative partners and their agencies who made the above happen and a happy new year to you! mWe are excited about 2015 being a mainstream year for our technology! If we don’t see you at CES, why don’t you download our SDK today and see what you can build upon it?

As we run full force into the holday shopping season, we aren’t going to talk about beacons – you can read about that from our ’tis the season post from last year. This season of retail we found ourselves in London where we spoke at the Unbound Digital conference on the future of marketing in our mobile, digital world.

The session that we moderated, Creativity & Innovation in Advertising had inspiration from three startups, ours plus two Israel founded.  Tal Cholozen from Innovid and Tal Keinan from AdExtent were the digitially distruptive innovators.  There were also some heavy hitters working at huge companies on the panel.  Eric Salma from WPP’s 18,000 employee research group Kantar along with Khurram Hamid from GlaxoSmithKline digital.  Finally, Mel Varley of GroupM company MEC UK’s Chief Strategy Officer rounded out the panel.  You can see that 30 minute action packed session below.

Additionally, on the session before ours, company friend and tech luminary Yossi Vardi moderated a panel which included Marc Mathieu who spoke about Unilever working with startups like ours, to enable new customer interactions with mobile devices. We cut to the relevant part at 22:50 in this video below, but you can rewind to watch the complete and interesting story.

More to come on that project as well! Merry Christmas everyone!

The NewAer powered M-Pulse from Magnum has hit the UK iOS store!  It brings iBeacon + the NewAer Proximity Platform into one application.  You can find it at www.magnum-mpulse.com

Designed by Karmarama and programmed by Nice Agency, this application uses a combination of the NewAer Proximity Platform SDK along with StickNFind commercial grade iBeacons to make your smartphone truly smart!  After downloading and running the application your iPhone can now use its built in Bluetooth radio to let you know when your friends are nearby, as well as iBeacon enabled retail store coolers bringing you the ultimate digital ice-cream social!

Doodle from Libby @ libbydoodle.com

Since this app uses the latest wireless technology, when you install it, you need to enable some things in your iPhone…  But don’t worry, we’ve worked hard to make sure that they do not run down your battery like prior applications that use location around GPS satellites would.

First you need to turn on your Bluetooth by sliding the menu up up from the bottom of the iPhone screen and making sure the third circle icon that looks like a sideways bow tie is highlighted in white.  Then when you see the enable Bluetooth pop-up message within the application, click enable it to use this.  Then enable push notifications so that the updates work automatically.  Finally, you must enable the Bluetooth to be used in the background.  This lets the alerts for your friends to come through when the app is not running on the screen.  Don’t worry, we put a switch in side to let you turn off the push notifications on your own device if you do not want to be bothered.

That’s it!  You are now living in the future finding your friends with NewAer.  Your smartphone is now truly smart!

Download the M-Pulse app from www.magnum-mpulse.com or the iTunes store and click more for the press release and screenshots!

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In February we announced our partnership with Unilever and now we can state which one of our favorite brands that it’s with, Magnum Ice Cream! It’s a digital marketing first: a CPG brand launching a P2P beacon strategy vs. a retailer. Before diving into how the campaign works with the video below, here’s a recap of beacon technology in marketing today.

Even with NewAer’s invention of any “beaconing radio as an action” nearly five years ago, the beacon world is still in its infancy and rough around the edges. Apple’s iBeacon is just one year old and the most well-known beacon proponent, and to our belief, the few retailers and stadiums currently using it do so via “spammy” experiences. Each time you walk by a beacon, it triggers your phone to create a message of the iBeacon’s intent within an application.

The state of the beacon marketplace today.

Think about it like this; when your phone vibrates, you expect it to be a phone call, text message or an application you’ve permitted to disrupt your personal space digitally. Now amplify this with a new type of walk-by spam, where a second pass by an iBeacon brings up the same message. With iBeacon’s current lack of silencing second events (we call this “flapping,” like a door banging in the breeze) they continue to pop up as new inbound messages. We knew from the start of NewAer that we had to eliminate that while putting the power of the technology into the consumer’s hands.

Summer is here – so what better way to illustrate our automagical, non-intrusive technology than via an ice cream social with a twist?

With the forthcoming Unilever mPulse application, debuting in London as part of the 25th anniversary of Magnum ice cream and powered by the NewAer Proximity Platform SDK, will notify you when a friend is nearby, helping to create a spontaneous rendezvous. This alert is similar to a text message from a friend asking to meet, except it happens automatically via our engine. When there is an ice cream cooler nearby you and your friends, that message gets relayed as well. What’s special for consumers, and critical to marketers, is that we’re creating opportunities to connect with friends instead of a barrage of one-way marketing. Equally critical is the ability to turn off your device beaconing if you want to “go stealth” for some alone time. Naturally, mPulse does that too.

Working with Unilever’s agency Karamarama we came up with the ultimate app for connecting and reimagining the ice cream social – one that is powered by NewAer’s SDK of invisible bits, to create impulsive unexpected connections. Only NewAer could accomplish such a sophisticated campaign (yes, even Apple’s iBeacon cannot) as we are the only company in the space who specializes in making mobile devices like tablets and smartphones themselves communicate as beacons.

The announcement of NewAer partnering with the Unilever Foundry:

Last week we were honored to attend Cannes-Lions as guests of Unilever where CMO Keith Weed generated huge online buzz when he took the stage to discuss their innovation in consumer marketing, with their partnership video featuring NewAer. The opportunities for magical consumer moments driven by mobile technology are endless, and it seems that the trade press is beginning to realize that too.

In sum, ice cream bars never tasted so good! We hope to digitally run into friends in London when we launch in late July, and with the mPulse app, you will too!

We’ve been like kids in a candy store lately and wanted to share some of the big wins that we have had and share upcoming events that you can get involved with too!

NewAer & Unilever Kick Off Consumer Campaign:

In April, we kicked off our project with Unilever in London, which will leverage proximity ranging between fixed beacons as well as handsets that have downloaded their app powered by NewAer’s Proximity Platform.  This will be the first time that a consumer product leverages our “better than iBeacon” framework to enable devices to communicate with one another using our SDK in addition to the traditional application triggering with fixed iBeacons.  More on that to come!

2^nd Patent Awarded:

We were given a notice of allowance for our 2^nd patent around determining a virtual location based upon scanned wireless signals.  This is key to our automation engine driving a “state change” or creating some type of action either on your device or in the cloud based upon seeing a known beacon at a specific signal strength.  For a young company like ours to have two patents so quickly is a testament to our early forward vision and our swift-moving intellectual property team.  Congratulations guys!

Builders and Hacker Demos:

We spent a few days at MIT’s Media Lab Member Event media.mit.edu/events/spring14/day1 and left both inspired and motivated.  We met some teams doing some radically forward thinking projects, many of which were excited about our framework for machine-to-machine discovery.

After a chilly visit to the East coast, we headed to our favorite DIY event called Maker Faire www.makerfaire.com, where 150,000 people come to see what thousands of others built from their workbench or garage.  The quality of some of the vehicles blew us away, but we were most excited about the kids there who had built communication circuits, robots, and even a pneumatic actuated bench that was synchronized to a roller coaster ride!  Keep it up future inventors!

Partner Demo Days:
The first week of June we are in Dublin at our telecom partner Alcatel-Lucent IMS User’s conference, where we show our “one number to any destination” routing using proximity and their IMS infrastructure www.alcatel-lucent.com/products/converged-telephony-server with CTS and the Self Care API. A video of the debut of it is here.

For the second week we head to London for the Europa’s theeuropas.com, then Founders Forum www.foundersforum.eu as we ramp up for London Technology Week londontechnologyweek.co.uk. We are sponsoring a hackathon with the Sand Pit Labs hacximity.org where we’re giving an early look at our 4.0 SDK that allows peer-to-peer communication over unpaired BlueTooth Smart links and a prize for the best use of our SDK! Sign up for the hackathon here!

For the last half of June, we head to Berlin for our investor T-Venture www.t-venture.com with their T-Labs and T-Systems division around next generation automotive showrooms and retail traffic measuring and marketing.

We wrap our month of demos and meetings Europe at the 5^th year anniversary of the MLOVE ConFestival mlove.com/confestival/ were we will share stories of the Maker Faire and the future of all things triggered from any beacon!

We’d love to meet you at the events above, so let us know if you’re going to be in the mix above too, and lets talk about our better than iBeacon framework.  We would love to see how it can tie into your applications or infrastructure!

Dave presenting at 4YFN GSMA Barcelona

At Mobile World Congress AKA MWC, we pitched along side several startups at the SWELL innovation awards, where we won their Innovation award.

That win pushed us to a second round in front of a room full of executives from Unilever, the number two advertiser in the world, with brands like Axe, Dove and Magnum ice cream bars.  We pitched them on the future of marketing on mobile devices, with automated messaging around our favorite topic, proximity communications.  It was thrilling to have such a large audience and see them share in our excitement.

Our vision for connecting people together along with places where their brands are able to be purchased resonated with their top executives as we were chosen in the top 7 of four-hundred submissions to be a part of the Unilever Go Global program and cannot wait to give you further announcements on our joint product launch!  Because of our presentation, we were awarded a pilot contract one of the global giant’s brands to create a next generation proximity application for them.

This news comes after our quick stop to our favorite geek spring break event, South By Southwest – AKA SXSW where we presented our file-sharing product at demo showcases like the SWELL Austin event!  Thanks for having us back for two events in a row gang!  We also had a get-together with our investor Intel Capital, and a handful of their startup posse at Swift’s Attic, which was a great break from the rain on Saturday afternoon!

We bypassed the food trucks one night, for a delicious Texas steak dinner with our friends at PayPal, and hung with the Bluetooth SIG another evening where the term BTLE Bluetooth 4.0 and BLE was officially renamed Bluetooth Smart.  Thank you for simplifying the messaging gang!  At the Bluetooth meetup, we stressed that companies and app developers need to secure communications over wireless radios between devices, as any of this data can be captured “in flight” and needs to obfuscate usernames, identity tokens and URLS to identities like photo URLs.  Our proximity communications SDK helps those who are not experts in the “wireless data in motion” not have to worry about private data exposure, which could hamper the very industry, others are just getting started in.

This week, we were at CeBIT AKA Centrum für Büroautomation, Informationstechnologie ind Telekommunikation which is the worlds largest computer expo, spanning 5 million sq feet and more than 200,000 attendees.  Here we debuted proximity in automotive retail showrooms and will have more to come on that as the weeks progress!

That’s a snapshot of our past few weeks at a glance, and we’re so thankful for the wins and proud of what we’ve accomplished – but we want to see how you are inspired by our engine, so check out our NewAer.com/Share application which uses our proximity platform SDK to automate actions based upon nearby radio waves and show us what you have for an app idea.