After years of great hosting from Google's Blogger platform, we are moving to the Word Press engine.  This is kept as a legacy site, but all of the stories from here are now duplicated and searchable at our site blog.newaer.com so head over there now!

Thank you Blogger!

It’s showtime at Mobile World Congress 2014

Mobile is heating up in Europe!  In 2011, we made our first trip to Barcelona to debut our all radio detecting Proximity Platform.  This act kicked the doors wide open to partnerships with Alcatel-Lucent for the debut of next generation call routing at the following CES and a relationship with the Intel software team, which was a precursor to their strategic investment in our company the following year.

This year we have teamed up with that same Software team from Intel to bring in-proximity device discovery to their Common Connectivity Framework (called CCF to those in the know)  which debuts at the WIPJam hackathon from the 24^th through 26^th. 

NewAer is a great addition to Intel's latest CCF framework for peer-to-peer communication. By leveraging the power of the NewAer Proximity Platform for discovery, and the new CCF communication node API you can easily build applications to leverage both proximity discovery and peer-to-peer communication. It is a snap to wire the NewAer API to the CCF discovery node system and unlock use cases like proximity based messaging or file transfer. Just a few lines of code are required to tie these two frameworks together to great result. An example of the simplicity of this on Android is at the end of this post.

In addition to the WIPJam event with Intel, we are presenting some of our applications like Share at the Four Years From Now (4YFN) SWELL Startup competition on February 25^th.  Our good friends at WearableWorld.co are also having a Wearable Wednesday event on, you guessed it, Wednesday.

Additionally, we want to make sure you know about Intel’s Code for Good campaign to help connect and enrich the lives of every person on earth.  Even if they do not have access to the Internet.  http://software.intel.com/codeforgood

All week we will be tweeting what we are up to at www.twitter.com/newaer and Intel Events http://twitter.com/intelevents will be at their handle.

Before we sign off, Wired Magazine UK published our story on how the Internet began and how it has now evolved.  We follow that with the world moving towards devices as beacons, from Bluetooth 2.0 to modern BTLE, WiFi, cellular tower or even the upcoming LTE Direct, nicknamed LTE-D.  Our favorite quote from the story is “Why couldn't we create valuable experiences from discovery of devices nearby, without the need to connect to them?”  That is how NewAer was born!

You can read it online here.  http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2014/02/ideas-bank/yes-your-wireless-devices-shall-connect-seamlessly

And now that snippet of code that I promised you! 

NewAer 3.0 SDK Release at CES 2014

So you just scored the latest gadgets for Christmas and a couple weeks later they’re obsolete. Happy New Year to you! This birth/rebirth is thanks to the annual technology pilgrimage to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Association CES event. 150,000 people grab sneak peeks at 300,000 electronic gadgets which are better, lighter and faster than the ones you just asked for. While this show is really all about the gadgets, we’ve been known to leverage CES to launch software like Boxee in 2008 (who were later acquired by Samsung in 2013.)

This year, the show is buzzing with Bluetooth Low Energy (BTLE) in the form of watches, heart rate monitors, smoke alarms, keyfobs and of course beacons….beacons, beacons – even CES organizers are using show floor beacons to connect to the CES App. It’s exciting to finally see our predictions realized - these beacons will be commoditized, and real value is in the software that enables them to make powerful automatic interactions vs “pop-up” warnings or marketing nags.

Response from partners at CES has been overwhelmingly positive, because we’re actually a step ahead of iBeacon. The NewAer Proximity Platform SDK now includes our proprietary cloud fingerprinting technology which can read any beaconing radio, from Cellular to WiFi to Bluetooth 2.0 or BTLE. This is the technology we used to enable our amazing file sharing app, Share. We have repacked this technology behind Share and are now delivering it as part of our SDK.  Using this back-end we are able to provide the FIRST and ONLY device-to-device (as in phone to phone – not just iBeacon to phone) proximity software that is works across Android and iPhone handsets or tablets, without costly battery consuming external hardware beacons. It even works with Bluetooth turned off. Try to do that with iBeacons!

These features are provided when using the two new scan types that we have added in this week’s 3.0 release, launching at CES: NewAer Devices and NewAer Areas.

Thanks to feedback at our 2013 hackathons, this release features a simplified scanner interface with just four scan types:

1) Generic Scan - Gives access to all locally visible devices the hardware and OS allow, including: WiFi, Bluetooth, BTLE, NFC and Cell Towers.

2) Service Scan - Gives access to Bonjour services on your local WiFi or Bluetooth.

3) NewAer Device - Gives access to devices in proximity running your applications, regardless of platform.

4) NewAer Area - Provides an identifier for an elastic physical area. Think of it as a "proximity group,” which can easily be used to create proximity chat rooms or social media connections with anyone  nearby.

We have also added the ability for different apps from the same developer to see NewAer Devices from either application when in proximity.  This means that you can now declare that two of your NewAer enabled apps are "friends" using our self-serve SDK portal and they will see NewAer Devices with the same identifier across both applications.

This NewAer 3.0 SDK fixes a huge limitation of iBeacon where one beacon can only speak to one application. Note that we believe in a user’s control over his or her privacy and we firewall off apps from different vendors, preventing them from seeing one another. We also can shut down those who use our SDK and might abuse this feature.

Step into the future of cross-platform proximity using the NewAer SDK and see what proximity enhancing your applications can do for your users.

On more thing!  If you are in the United Kingdom, grab the January 2014 issue of Wired magazine to read our story on the future of wireless called “Your wireless devices shall connect seamlessly.”  We will share it here when it’s posted to the online world in the coming weeks.  For now, it’s on newsstands only!

-Dave and the NewAer Proximity engineering team