Estimote Creator Talks About Building An ?OS For The Physical World?

Estimote’s first prototype looked like a parrot. They designed it to sit in stores and count the humans entering and leaving the location and could register their paths through the aisles and even added analytics based on sex and purchasing patterns. In all, if you were a store owner, that weird little parrot, eternally connected to the Internet, was a brand new way of doing business. The parrot is gone but Estimote has just launched out of the latest Y Combinator class and is ready to create an OS for physical locations. Their product, the Beacon, now looks like a lumpen, colored gem and sticks to the wall, reporting on current retail traffic and pushing notifications to shoppers – who have pre-registered for the messages, of course. The promise of the platform is thrilling if you’re in sales and even more interesting if you’re a customer. In short, the environment interacts with you in a manner heretofore unavailable to individual retailers and it does it using your own smartphone. Originally founded in Krakow, Poland by Jakub Krzych and ?ukasz Kostka, the company ran under the radar in 2012 – the parrot was a preliminary prototype – and is now officially accepting pre-orders. The pair have MSc degrees in computer science and Krzych founded AdTaily, a self-service advertising network. I spoke to Krzych about the project. TC: Describe the Estimote in your own words. Krych: Estimote is a technology startup that is engaged in building a sensor-based analytics and engagement platform. We developed what we like to call an operating system for physical locations?one that will change how people run businesses in the physical world and how consumers interact with real-world products and venues. Our primary area of interest at this moment is brick and mortar retail stores. More than 90 percent of transactions worldwide are still made in physical venues. More importantly, more than half of consumers who visit stores have smartphones, and that number is growing rapidly. Thanks to popular communication technologies such as Bluetooth and WiFi, there are exciting new opportunities to understand how people behave and engage with products in stores. New data and communication technology can be used to improve customer experience, bringing in new revenue streams for retail stores or cutting their costs. We call this smart retail. We are currently piloting our solutions with the largest retailers in the United States and Europe. We

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