A remarkaBLE week in Bluetooth

The headlines:

• 01 12 16 — HID Global Acquires Bluvision to Expand With Bluetooth Solutions for the Enterprise Internet of Things Market (press release)
• 05 12 16 — Gimbal is Joining The Mobile Majority (press release)
• 07 12 16 — Bluetooth 5 Now Available (press release)

It’s not every week that you see two companies in your competitive landscape acquired, in addition to the first major evolution of the standard on which your core technology is based! Amidst everything else that’s happened in 2016, perhaps we’re the only ones to remark this remarkaBLE coincidence, but it’s certainly not without significance!

In 2012, when we started reelyActive, our expected exit was an enterprise acquisition: build a better real-time location system (RTLS), raise the right eyebrows, combine agile innovation with access to the right resources. It would appear that Bluvision have done just that, which is commendable given the track record of outcomes for RTLS companies (our co-founders cut their teeth at one which inevitably failed!)

Over the past few months, we’ve shifted our immediate focus to the out-of-home (OOH) market which has a pressing need to reach and engage individuals in the real-world, in real-time, and in context (all the while measuring the results). It would appear that Gimbal and The Mobile Majority have come together to do just that for mobile advertising.

What makes this week’s coincidence so striking to us?

Where Gimbal and The Mobile Majority are headed, we’re taking our novel Bluetooth RTLS technology, like that of Bluvision.

When Bluvision CEO Jimmy Buchheim showed us his BluFi prototype in 2014, we knew we weren’t alone in developing “bring-your-own-device” (BYOD) RTLS technology allowing any Bluetooth Low Energy device, including the ones we carry and wear, to be identified and tracked throughout a space. This is the inverse (literally!) of what Gimbal and almost every other mobile-focused company is doing today with beacons.

But what about the future? To us, advertising is backwards, as much for brands as for Bluetooth packets! Which brings us to Bluetooth 5.

With 4x range, 2x speed and 8x broadcasting message capacity, the enhancements of Bluetooth 5 focus on increasing the functionality of Bluetooth for the IoT.

While the Bluetooth SIG are advertising (pun intended) the above features as key to the future of IoT, what’s key to us is that Bluetooth 5 hasn’t upset the existing wireless advertising functionality (which, for us, makes it the undisputed global standard for Active RFID). This means that the growing billions of people, products and places with Bluetooth radios will retain the possibility of being discoverable on a human scale, advertising what they want, when they want and with whom they want.

Our mission is to unlock the value of the data [they] choose to share.

And the week’s events have emboldened us on that mission, affirming the value of BYOD RTLS and of reaching audiences in the real-world, while protecting and extending the wireless standard which makes our vision a reality.