A new and exciting year for proximity!

As we built our first version of the then spelled NeuAer Proximity Platform in 2010, we knew that we were onto something. We became the forerunner of the next generation of location-based services. Creating a technology that would work both indoors and out, as a licensable engine to allow other developers to leverage what were formerly “stray” or ambient radio signals.

When we won Best Technology at Jason Calacanis’ LAUNCH competition in 2011, the tech community told us that we had a hit on our hands. Investors swooned and before we knew it, unsolicited term sheets for convertible notes were arriving in our in-box.

As a bootstrapped company, accepting early money from outside investors would have removed some of the fundraising pressure and provided breathing room to grow faster. However, we respectfully declined each offer and decided to grow with customers, albeit slowly, while looking for the right strategic investors.

We are happy to write that our first commercial license came in 2011 and we closed an investment round in 2012 with huge companies considered to be the right strategic matches, that could leverage our vision within their own products or services.

First to the boardroom table in our series seed (which is investor speak for pre-series A) was Intel Capital, the investment arm of the Intel processor empire. With their investment we are bringing our engine into more than just smartphones by building next generation collaboration platforms for laptops and mobile devices.

Rounding out the investment was T-Venture, the investment arm of Deutsche Telekom, which is the German based giant behind the T-Mobile carrier group worldwide. Watch for future news from their business units on these blog pages.

As for 2013, we are off to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show, known by many of us as a gadget heaven, to demonstrate integration that we have been working on all summer. With phone networks moving to 4G or LTE today, the next generation of voice & video calls will be made on VoLTE (Voice over LTE networks.) Our technology taps into this next generation carrier infrastructure of Alcatel-Lucent via their IMS platform and its API capabilities. This collaboration came into place as a member of their “ng Connect” program. We will be demoing in their booth in the South Hall #31412. Look for us in the inner ring of the Alcatel-Lucent partners if you are there!

Finally, we are going back to our competition roots, sponsoring the hack-a-thon of the same conference where we debuted, LAUNCH on March 2nd in San Francisco. This is where we will launch our SDK that goes inside of YOUR applications, or devices, debut our second-generation API “action engine” in the cloud and a few other tricks that we have been working ourselves. Best thing for you developers out there, is that we are giving away a $2,000 prize to the team who builds our favorite application on the NewAer platform.

What a fast few years it has been. We are excited to have our partners, customers and new investors in the now easy to pronounce NewAer, Inc. and are off to the races. If you are in the industry, come say hello to us in Vegas at CES or Barcelona for Mobile World Congress. We can give the run-down on why proximity beats location-based services in power consumption and speed for your own applications, devices or services. Happy New Year, everyone, and developers, we will see you at LAUNCH!

Post SXSW Interactive 2012 Wrap-up!

As I write this, we have been back just a few days from more than 16,000 miles of travel that started in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress, made our way through San Francisco for the LAUNCH festival, and finally to Austin, Texas for South by Southwest Interactive.

Each of these brought us great meetings with new partners and a lot of lessons learned about the state of the mobile nation. At MWC, we saw handsets that are getting thinner, with larger screens and better audio like the HTC One.

The LAUNCH conference brought us old friends from last year, and new up-and comers like the 2012 winner of our 2011 Best Technology honor Captricity which takes paper forms and turns them into digitally readable documents.

Finally, at SXSW we hooked up with friends from the East & West coast, and all over Europe as well, to see the latest social software and applications that were breaking weeks before the conference.

The hype in Austin this year was around apps that would alert you to when you are in range of your friends or people whom you should meet. These used GPS satellites in the sky to setup "geo fencing" to compare your approximate location with another user of the same app. Leveraging GPS is easy, since all smartphone operating systems have the technology as a built-in API to plug right into your app. The problem though, is that GPS radios need a clear view of the sky to operate and because your body is made mostly of "radio blocking" water, trying to get a signal from a transmitter in outer-space is a difficult feat. Additionally, when you are inside a building, receiving GPS signals is next to impossible due to construction materials or even the metallic window tint or bonded coatings on some glass.

We dig a bit deeper into our solution around our Proximity Platform as a substitute for GPS based APIs through this story that we wrote for VentureBeat.
Why GPS-based smart apps failed to go viral at SXSW.

Take a look at the story and drop us a line through our contact page if you want to work with our API on the Android or iOS mobile operating systems! Although we are glad to be home now, we certainly will see you at the next mobile conference!

Indoor Mapping via WiFi from Google Maps

Those of you with Android phones are getting an update for the Maps application bringing it to version 6.0. With this comes the ability for it to provide your location inside of a building – at least in those few locations that have been mapped by the Google team. Currently these venues are a few airports and shopping malls, like the ginormous 500 store Mall of America. Their announcement comes just after Black Friday, the most shopped time of the year & a little late to make a dent, but interesting nonetheless.

To find your location inside of a building, the Google Maps application uses the WiFi access points that span malls and airport halls, using radio waves to determine the floor and spot that you are approximately in front of. It will not have the specificity that GPS does, as WiFi signals were not designed originally for this type of use, but will give you the general area where you can find yourself. Since GPS signals do not penetrate the roof of buildings, WiFi is a good fall-back technology.

Google Maps before on the left, and with interior capabilities on the right

We at NeuAer use these WiFi signals, along with Bluetooth and Near Field (NFC) to trigger events within our Proximity Platform. We don’t necessarily know where you are, as we do not have the corresponding physical space map that Google does, nor do we care to know where you are. Developers using our proximity platform use those same radio waves that Google uses for maps to trigger things within their software or even up to the cloud.

Knowing where you are in a building is one thing. Having your phone act upon where you are in a building is what we at NeuAer believe is paramount to making your smart phone truly smart. This is partially because going to stores like IKEA are the bane of our existence, so much that we like to traverse their stores backwards – from the exit to the front.

Here’s an example video on how Google aims to make that trip to find your particleboard furniture a little bit easier. IKEA and Google indoor maps

If you want to try it out on your on Android phone, here are the current launch locations which support the indoor map data: Mall of America, IKEA, The Home Depot, select Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s, Daimaru, Takashimaya and Mitsukoshi locations and more. Airports like the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL), Chicago O’Hare (ORD), San Francisco International Airport (SFO) and Narita International (NRT) in Japan.

So try it out and let us know if you can find the bathrooms any easier. You can find us at the “You Are Here” sticker on the analog map!

Here is the original story from the Google Blog.


On a more somber note, our best wishes go out to the family of Charles Walton, the inventor of RFID or Radio Frequency ID tags, who passed away on November 6th. These wireless reader-powered ID chips are a precursor to NFC (Near Field Communication) tags that we use as yet another trigger our NeuAer API.
The story on his passing from Venturebeat.com

Sharing some Mobile Love in Germany

Today marks the day that we were supposed to be landing in sunny California, relaxing and reconnecting with friends and the rest of the team; talking about the adventure we have had on our European road show. We had great meetings, met some amazing people and will have some announcements on projects that we are going to be working on once all the legal stuff gets sorted out! More to come on that front.

This was a great trip socially too as the Black Eyed Peas played a rain delayed show in New York, London had a weekend music celebration, where it rained for only one day of it! Even Paris began their summer with a solstice music celebration with bands on nearly every street corner.

Whilst (which is fancy Brit speak for while in the US) in London we were lucky enough to be introduced to an advisor to the MLOVE conference www.mlove.com/mlove2011/ and submitted our gem showcase application ToothTag into the running for the startup competition. Would you guess we got accepted to present? Well, we did, and this means that we are staying another week in Berlin for new meetings and then head to the conference in the 100 room 19th century castle!

So are you going to be one of the "knights in the castle" at Mobile Love 2011? If so, we'd love to chat with you and see what you are up to!

Join us on our 2011 World ToothTag Tour!

We just left San Francisco and are headed across the country, then onto the world for a NeuAer road show with our Proximity Platform, and we want to meet you!

Our voyage began in San Francisco with the Apple World Wide Developers conference, known to the 5,200 developers in attendance as WWDC. Steve Jobs looked thin when he took the stage as the audience rose in applause, but his keynote excited us with talk of a few of the 1,500 new iOS APIs. These are the software controls that applications like ours get access to on the iPhone and iPad. We cannot wait to get under the proverbial development hood and see which ones of them will give us the same user experience that we have with ToothTag on the Android platform today. While version 5 of Apple’s mobile operating system goes live in the fall, we are looking to see what magic we can make happen with ToothTag today!

Our favorite of these announcements is the “geofence” built into their Reminders application, which allows you to setup a pop-up reminder “when I arrive” or “when I leave” an area. This will be enabled through the iPhone maps application and sends a pop-up a message on-screen to remind you to do an action. So called “geofences” have been around on web portals for mobile phone companies for years, but this is the first time that it has the potential to hit the mainstream. This is a pre-cursor to what we are doing at NeuAer, so we are excited for more people to have visibility into our space! For those newbies to our company, our platform allows triggers not just around geo, or location, but also for people, places and things. It’s not just pop-ups either, but music, maps and actions on the phone as well as the automatic execution of web-based events like social media check-ins as well. Plus, we work inside buildings where geofencing typically works best outdoors.

After a day of meetings with old and new friends at WWDC, we are off to New York for Internet Week, which is like no other conference we have been to. It is scattered across the vast blocks of Manhattan and is a smattering of office open houses, sessions in performance halls and of course the obligatory rooftop cocktail hours. We are excited to get in front of some of our favorite Silicon Alley companies like foursquare, boxee and even some new companies with mixed case names like ours!

Next up is Tel Aviv where we will be sharing ToothTag with old and new friends; some of which we caught up with on Summit at Sea and at the Kinnernet conferences in Israel and Washington DC. Tel Aviv reminds us of San Francisco with cool architecture, a tight knit technology community and tons of innovation! Plus we cannot wait for the “tiny” salad bowls at lunch!

We round out the trip in London and Paris where we are meeting with partners in the communications space and would love to see other innovative companies!

So if you or your team are in any of these amazing cities through the end of June, let us know by sending an email to partners @ neuaer.com, or click on the contact form on our website. We will be in New York for Internet Week, Tel Aviv from the 13th through 17th, London and Paris on the 18th through 23rd. We’d love to chat about making your smartphone projects truly smart with the Proximity Platform from NeuAer!

While the sales and executive team is on the road, we want to thank some of the pictured crew back at home for making ToothTag the amazing product that it is today. Here’s to you guys and gals, and we will be sure to bring back some more great projects for the platform!

NFC + ToothTag = Open Coolness at Google IO

Asia gets all of the cool stuff first like tiny laptops (we called them netbooks - they were cool before tablets became vogue) and mobile broadband. Even QR codes that could launch websites with camera phones, as typing URLs with their alphabet on 10-key numeric phones was a pain. Now the hot thing is Near Field Communications (nicknamed NFC because geeks need acronyms) for commerce or information about stores. We think NFC is neat, but much bigger than retail - so we figured it was time to make them cool.

In America, as I write this, the Nexus S from Samsung has the necessary hardware to read NFC tags. The user experience is really boring though. You don't need to launch an app like you do to read QR codes, just touch a NFC tag, and see content from the tag. For us at Team NeuAer, that wasn't cool enough. We wanted to actually DO THINGS based upon our phones sensing a tag, just as we automate actions from WiFi and Bluetooth. Plus, we wanted to more than just basic things within the phone like play a song, but to also hook into web API's like check-in on foursquare. We thought about even grander ideas like setting triggering your lighting and playing music in your house. While we are not going to provide you the home automation system, we are going to let you hook into yours! We are opening our proximity platform around ToothTag. With Android at Home announced today, it seems that we weren't the only one thinking about automating your environment.

This marks the first time that our ToothTag engine for proximity plumbing is available for developers to create their own web services that can be executed based upon your smartphone seeing another wireless radio. You can write your own apps in your favorite language, or use our examples built in Ruby on Rails or Python and can host them at Heroku or Google App Engine online. Both of these are FREE services (you can thank us later) for you to get started immediately. ToothTag will act as a gateway to trigger your own services based upon seeing any wireless technology that the phone can. All automatically.

At the Google IO conference in 2011 we are also giving away thousands of ToothTag stickers with NFC chips inside; for you use to build your own actions to automate your life. Of course you can perform our default actions, but better yet, we want you to write your own. Because we want to give you the tools to create the next generation of automated actions to make your smartphone truly smart.

We're excited to see what you come up with! So hit the proximityplatform.com link below and show us what you've got!

P.S. Once you scan a few NFC tags, you'll get some interesting names; vs the pseudo-random bytes that identify a tag by default. We figured those tag numbers were boring and came up with our own naming convention. Let us know what we did to come up with this schema, via the comments.

Links:
m.toothtag.net - Our download landing page embedded on the NFC tags for Google IO hosted by our friends at www.getsharesquare.com"
Here is www.proximityplatform.com - Our developer page for YOU to make web apps that run inside of ToothTag

And if you need a NFC capable Android device, Best Buy just put the latest version of the 4G Nexus S up for $149 too!

How to meet 1000 people in a weekend

Some 999 odd lucky others and I spent last weekend together on a cruise ship that left the port of Miami, and had no idea where it was going. You see, it was the journey that we were there for, not the destination. We went to network and listen to speakers like Richard Branson interviewed by Chris Sacca, Russell Simmons, Gary Veynerchuk and Tim Ferriss. These names were our hook to come, and they were good, but what turned out to be better was being in the company of the most amazing A-type scrappy entrepreneurs from around the world. This all took place on an invite only event called Summit at Sea, produced by the team at summitseries.com on Twitter @summitseries & hashtag #SASea. I was lucky to have several friends from prior conferences like Kinnernet on the boat, and even luckier to have my two best friends invited too, on coincidentally what I call my best birthday. Ever.

Before getting into my story, I must thank the team of Jeff, Elliott, Ron, Brett, Jeremy, Josh and all the other staff who made sure we were hydrated, stimulated and engaged on our three day tour. They spent untold man and woman hours converting a stuffy cruise ship into a conference and concert hall, dance club and platform to bring innovators together like no other conference I have attended. They achieved the transformation with flying colors and glow sticks. Even the staff on the ship were blown away by our energy and enthusiasm.

This venue was perfect for me - you see, I love networking. I live for telling and hearing stories from entrepreneurs. As a lifetime technology guy, I started going to computer club meetings before I could drive myself to them and have always been into the human connections around technology. Anything to make connecting better or faster is right up my alley. Oh, and thanks for the rides to the computer club so long ago mom and dad!

Back to the matter at hand. Meeting a thousand people, even within the contained hull of a 12 story ship turns out to be impossible even for an extravert like me. There are just too many interesting people to meet and even miss-matched conversations, activities and cat-naps taking precious time out of the day and night. Since the networking went on throughout the night, the mantra "I'll sleep when I'm dead" became crucial to maximize connections.

So how could we optimize this? All attendees were given a Poken which is simply a hand shaped, USB charged and synced plastic gadget that you can high-five with another same to exchange device IDs with someone else. These IDs are mapped to online user profiles, so when you plug yours into your computer, a website will match your collected IDs to human identities. However, two days into the event they started glowing yellow then red on the last day on the ship. Was the battery dying? I thought so, but no. We were coming up against the limit of just 64 identities being able to be stored within the device.

Worse yet, it was hard to see the green acknowledgment light in the sunlight of the Caribbean, so several connections that I made during the day turned into ghosts in the machine. My real issue was the lack of a real-time referral engine within the device. As a "connector" I frequently bring like minded individuals together. As I mentioned miss-matched connections above, those who did not relate to my likes and interests, were frequently people whom I would like to connect to my friends who share their interests. There was no way to do this on the Poken, a gadget that is no more than an infrared code exchanger.

As we were at sea, with limited (read: costly) Internet connectivity, the offline nature of the conference was both a positive and negative. We were thankfully forced to interact with one another face to face versus use our "digital adult pacifiers" aka smartphones. There was an intranet on the boat with information on the attendees, but our Poken was not attached to this for real-time info. If you wanted to look people up, you had to do so manually on your own accord. There was no "who is relevant to me nearby" that I dreamed of.

So the problem lies there. Even if you could get around and talk to 999 other people, you could only hold a fraction of them in your electronically augmented memory bank then had to remember whom you wanted to connect to your friends and colleagues. What we needed was an online or offline, forwarding capable device with a filtering mechanism for matching like-minded individuals. Simple?

Well, it's not as hard as you think it would be with the use of our proximity platform. The solution goes like this; Identities of the attendee smartphones wirelessly broadcast their IDs, much like the Poken, but at a range that would be readable by people that you could see within a room. Metal walls of a ship would likely block these signals between walls and floors. This means that the "filter" of people in attendance to a guest speaker would be a first level of like mindedness among attendees.

These IDs would too be matched back to identities via the intranet or Internet, but thanks to the screen of a smartphone, and the intelligence of a back-end database with filtering done at a further level. You could find people who match your interests and chose whom you wish to speak to in an effort to be more efficient with your time. You could also forward connections to those who are not a "match" to your friends who are. An artificial intelligence layer on your mobile phone could sift through hundreds of people in a room effortlessly and give you the dozen or two that you could benefit from meeting. Now I do not envision this as a replacement for human connections and serendipity, as I made some amazing connections with people who are not in my domain expertise, but as they say time is money. With what became a "way too short weekend" we could never meet all 1000 great people on the cruise.

So there is a quick productization of the ultimate human connector and time saver. This has been attempted with GPS satellite geo fencing, RFID "radio tags" and QR codes; but our platform enables your everyday Android and iPhone to achieve this type of proximity connectivity with just our intelligent engine inside a room. Without new hardware or a clear view of the sky.

So what do you think? Are you ready for the future of human connections at your next conference?