Gimbal aims to turn any Bluetooth Low Energy device into a beacon

Mobile location and proximity services provider Gimbal has begun licensing its Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacon firmware to enable almost any device with BLE to act as a beacon — including ATMs, jukeboxes, access points, vending machines and more.

Kevin Hunter, COO at Gimbal
SECURE: Kevin Hunter, COO at Gimbal

“Gimbal’s proprietary firmware is capable of running on existing embedded platforms including Windows, Linux, Android and proprietary systems,” the Qualcomm spin-off explains.

“Through this solution, Gimbal is licensing the ability to both transmit and detect beacons. For internet-connected devices, Gimbal firmware provides the ability to manage these devices via Gimbal’s cloud service.”

“Adding Gimbal beacon technology to devices will enable retailers, hotels, venues, advertisers and out-of-home (OOH) networks to reach their mobile app users as well as to monetize their beacon networks by securely sharing access to these beacons with partners, sponsors or digital ad networks.”

“We have different firmware packages for different chipsets and different operating environments so we try to minimize the effort to build and incorporate this into or on top of your existing environment,” Gimbal COO Kevin Hunter explained to NFC World.

“That way, you can scale out to either existing chips that are incorporated or new chips that are going to be put inside a new infrastructure. We wanted to make it easy for a development team to be able to incorporate it and add that value to their offering.”

“I think when you start to license out firmware, it really gives you this secure discovery for that physical world that transcends so many different areas; home, enterprise and municipalities. All the different places we go in our lives can benefit from having this firmware incorporated,” Hunter continued.

“The idea was really to allow the market to take advantage of existing infrastructure or new infrastructure and allow them to deploy it fast and make it simple for them. We feel like we’re very much in a unique position by doing this and the interest is very strong.”

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