New Mist BLE Alliance Drives the Adoption of High Accuracy Indoor Location Services

CUPERTINO, CA--(Marketwired - Dec 13, 2016) - Mist, a pioneer in smart wireless networking for the smart device era, announced today the creation of the Mist Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Alliance to drive the adoption and evolution of high accuracy indoor location services. The Mist BLE Alliance is a broad network of ecosystem companies who are collaborating to provide thought leadership around BLE, while ensuring the seamless interoperability of various BLE components with Mist's wireless platform. 

Through the Mist BLE Alliance, Mist is working with a wide range of vendors to ensure their mapping, application development, navigation, marketing, and scheduling technologies seamlessly integrate with the Mist wireless platform. This facilitates the adoption of various indoor location-based services like wayfinding, proximity messaging, and resource scheduling across numerous industries, including healthcare, retail, hospitality, and education.

"Travel, retail and hospitality location-based technology is evolving in new directions, and remains top of mind for many Gartner clients," -- Gartner Cool Vendors in Mobile and Wireless report, 2016 (which includes Mist Systems).*

"It is great to see the BLE industry come together and apply the lessons learned from the last few years to facilitate mass market adoption of indoor location services," said Patrick Connolly, Principal Analyst for ABI Research. "Through alliances like this one, BLE indoor location will spread rapidly across a range of consumer, corporate, and industrial markets, reaching nearly every building by 2025."

Seamless Location-Based Solutions
The Mist wireless platform includes the Mist Intelligent Wireless Cloud and Mist Access Points, which deliver the following unique features for indoor location services:

• Virtual BLE (vBLE) -- Deploy an unlimited number of virtual beacons on a floorplan with the simple click of a mouse, or automated via a programmable API.
• No on-site calibration -- Mist APs have a dynamic vBLE 16 antenna array that works with machine learning in the Mist cloud to deliver 1-3 meter accuracy and sub-second latency with no manual calibration.
• Proactive insight -- The Mist platform tracks visits, dwell times and other location analytics for accurate resource allocation.
• Open APIs for easy integration -- Mist offers a mobile SDK for iOS and Android for seamless integration with complementary products.

Mist is partnering with the following industry leaders to ensure that the Mist wireless platform works seamlessly with their leading BLE products:

Connexient provides the platform, tools and services required to build and maintain Navigation-quality maps and Navigation Services as an Enterprise solution. When combined with Mist's indoor location services, healthcare providers have a robust solution for wayfinding and proximity messaging. 

Entappia is a leader in custom application development and rapid prototyping for proof of concepts. By leveraging Mist's SDK for indoor location, Entappia brings high value services to mobile users, such as wayfinding and proximity messaging.

Jibestream offers a premier mapping engine and indoor navigation for the enterprise. Jibestream's SDKs and APIs allows for easy integration with other systems and applications, increasing the reach, flexibility and value for each customer. By combining the Jibestream solution with Mist's wireless platform, you get a proven solution for high accuracy, low latency indoor wayfinding and proximity messaging that is cost effective to deploy and simple to manage.

Micello is a worldwide leader providing indoor maps and navigation data. Micello's map software works seamlessly with Mist's wireless platform to deliver high accuracy, low latency indoor wayfinding and virtual beacon proximity services.

Phunware provides mobile solutions that leverage native smartphone features and location technology to empower mobile users in the healthcare, hospitality, and retail spaces. Phunware applications, mapping software, and blue dot capabilities work transparently with the Mist SDK for wayfinding, proximity messaging, and other high value location-based services.

Rifiniti takes workplace analytics and resource scheduling to a new level. By combining the powerful insights and flexibility of Rifiniti Optimo analytics and Reserv scheduling with Mist's leading wireless platform for location services, the two companies maximize workplace insight and resource efficiency with the highest level of accuracy, while increasing employee satisfaction through enhanced services.

RoamingAround was designed to create a valued communications conduit with mobile users that is always relevant and never annoys. By combining RoamingAround's robust mobile engagement solution with Mist's leading wireless platform, the two companies bring wireless personalization to a new level.

Swirl is the leading Mobile Presence Management and Marketing Platform, helping large-scale retailers and brands leverage digital location signals including GPS, WiFi and Bluetooth beacons to engage and influence consumers in and around their stores. By seamlessly integrating Mist Access Points and the Mist Intelligent Wireless Access Cloud with Swirl's enterprise-class marketing platform, the two companies enable the delivery of highly personalized, context-aware mobile content and experiences that revolutionize the in-store shopping experience.

For more information on the Mist BLE alliance, including joint solution sheets, please visit: https://www.mist.com/partners/BLEalliance

Helpful links:

• Mist website: www.mist.com
• Mist partners: www.mist.com/partners
• Mist platform: www.mist.com/platform
• Mist services: www.mist.com/services

About Mist
Mist built the first wireless platform for the Smart Device era. By taking a user-first approach to networking, the Mist Intelligent Wireless Cloud (IWC) eliminates the operational burdens of legacy wireless architectures by replacing time consuming manual tasks with machine learning and proactive automation. In addition, Mist is the first vendor to bring Enterprise grade Wi-Fi and BLE together to deliver a superior experience for wireless users and administrators. 

The Mist team consists of leading experts in wireless, machine learning, and cloud, who are responsible for building the largest and most advanced networks in the world. Founded in 2014, the company is based in Cupertino, CA and funded by top investors, including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Cisco Investments. For more information, visit www.mist.com.

* Gartner, Cool Vendors in Mobile and Wireless, 2016, 20 April 2016
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