This next team we’re going to meet is developing some great tech in the beacons field. For those unfamiliar with the technology yet, beacons are a piece of hardware that can be developed at a low cost and that use low-energy Bluetooth connections to broadcast messages or prompts directly to a smartphone or tablet. The problems with beacons is that they’re very low on security features, which limits their applications.
Of course, this is until a startup worked on a solution. Meet the team behind Onyx Beacon, one of the world’s first secured ibeacon compatible devices ready for enterprise usage! This is a technology that will definitely impact how people will use their mobile devices in the coming years, opening up plenty of new opportunities in the tech world.
But let’s hear more from Bogdan Oros, one of the co-founders of Onyx Beacon.
1. What is your startup’s product all about and what is the higher goal you’re trying to tackle?
We want to help mobile developers and businesses add context to their mobile apps. The next wave of experiences offered to mobile users is in delivering them messages related to their context. We want to complement the GPS, for indoor locations, so that mobile apps will deliver information and content related to the indoor position of the user. In the near future, when there will be millions of beacons globally, they will need to be managed and we will help businesses with our software solutions.
2. Tell us your startup’s story in a few highlights.
The idea came to us after we saw an event by Apple in September of last year where they introduced the concept of iBeacon. However, we postponed our idea for a couple of months to see how fast it would get adopted and if people would be interested. After talking with some digital agencies, as well as mobile developers, we figured that this will be a great market, which we want to be part of and where we want to launch some great products.
We started designing our hardware beacon in December of last year and we had the first shipments in March, before we actually had our product done (we were shipping just PCBs in a foil). That gave us a lot of courage since people were very willing to try our beacons very fast. Since then we managed to ship beacons for mobile developers in more than 20 countries and right now we’re trying to predict the future and to build software tools on top of the beacons that will make them easy to use as well as easy to manage.
3. Who is your team and why are you the best match to work on this product?
Our team is made of 6 full time people as well as 5-10 additional people who help us on project basis. We have a good blend of technical expertise (one of our engineers used to work with the founder of Android) as well as business (Roman Foeckl, our co-founder manages a successful data leakage prevention software company). We’re doers, we take strategic decisions and execute very fast. This allowed us to ship our product to customers within 3 months since we started working. Our technical mix of people, with hardware, as well as software background, allows us to understand the technical challenges mobile developers face as well as deliver on our promise.
Part of the Onyx Beacon team
4. What startups in/originating from the CEE do you look up to and which regional specialists would you like to have as mentors?
We always look up to Radu Georgescu and what he managed to achieve as a serial entrepreneur. We also like the ecosystem developed in Bulgaria by LAUNCHub and Eleven, who managed to attract great start-ups from the CEE region.
5. What are your favourite learning resources dedicated to startups?
We try to be like a sponge regarding accumulating knowledge. We read several blogs of tech founders as well as follow Paul Graham. Steve Blank’s tools of startups is one of the best up to date repositories on startup resources.
6. What is your business model and what makes you different from other tech companies that engineer beacons?
To be fair, right now we’re experimenting on the business model. Beside the beacons, we also have a CMS (in beta), that helps businesses push the content they define to nearby mobile users, as well as a Beacon Infrastructure Management Cloud.
What makes us very different at this point is the security layer we added to our devices. The vast majority of beacons out there don’t have security features in place, which means that anybody with a mobile app can basically change their configuration (UUID, Major and Minor), effectively hijacking the beacons for their own purposes. The most important thing a beacon does is broadcasting its identifiers, so that the mobile apps will know what message to deliver once the smartphone is in a certain range of a beacon. Our Beacons have a high level of security due to a mix of encryption, randomness and simplicity.
7. What are the main applications in this field and how do you foresee it will evolve in the coming years?
There are many applications in different verticals of business. Basically any business who wants to either deliver content based on proximity or gather information on user behavior indoor can use them. Of course the most used scenario right now is mobile marketing for retail (delivering a push notification on the customer’s phone when the customer is in proximity of the beacon and then getting analytics based on the what the user does with the push notification).
Because of the fact that we sponsored some hackathons with beacons in the last month in San Francisco, London, Moscow, Istanbul, Cluj-Napoca we also saw some great implementations using our beacons. For example in banking- when you enter the bank, a beacon triggers the banks mobile app on your phone, which lets the front desk officer know you arrived, allowing him to greet you by name or even pull up your file, saving time and improving customer experience. Another application we saw was in real estate- an augmented reality implementation using our beacons and Google Glass (this was done last week at the Techsylvania hackathon). When you’re close to a beacon in an area, on Google glass you could have information about the available properties to buy or rent within a certain range(1-2km). From Google Glass you would be able to select which property you’re interested in, as well as other information on it. You could also have a virtual tour of the property (also built using our beacons and Google glass).
We expect a bright future for the beacon technology. Based on the data collected from mobile developers, retailers, banks and telecom operators, in 3 years the market should be around 500 million devices globally. This will bring an opportunity also for the software built on top of the beacons which will help mobile developers deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time.
If you want to read more about Onyx Beacon, check out this article on Business Insider.