As you walk, your eyes are constantly processing everything around you, scanning for recognizable objects to give you context and help you navigate. If you close your eyes, it takes only a few moments for your brain to lose that context. You're also gonna want to stop walking because the next thing you know, you'll be running into a person or the nearest wall. This is almost identical to the way your smartphone works. It may be a powerful computer, but it's actually completely blind.

Estimote first released its product last year, a diminutive wireless Bluetooth Beacon sensor that provides location and information to smartphones. It's similar to a sign or information place-card, but instead it's displayed on your phone screen. Beacons have been used to help retail shops, museums, and restaurants keep track of where visitors were going. Now, Estimote has created small sticker iterations of the Beacon that can be placed anywhere.

Now called “Nearables”, the stickers have built-in accelerometers and temperature sensors, both of which should offer interesting advances in proximity-based apps and notifications. After sticking them to objects, Estimote's ready-made Bluetooth LE transmitter (rated to carry up to 70 meters) work in conjunction with and Estimote's developer platform (SDK for iOS/Android) to detect what the device is and provide contextual information about the world around it instantly. Users could pop a sticker on their dog's collar and receive a notification if she were to run too far away. Developers (Estimote's ultimate audience) could use the stickers to build a helpful alarm clock app that knew when you were in your room, took in traffic information and your personal schedule to decide the optimal time for you to wake. I cant help but think how much responsibility a little sticker is undertaking!

The hardware is an impossibly thin 3mm, shaped like little colored pieces of a stained glass window. Rather than using GPS, which is a huge drain on battery life, Bluetooth LE lifts that burden by working for an entire year without running out of juice. Estimote has signed up partners to work with the new hardware, including IDEO, Cisco, The Guggenheim Museum and more. Nearables are available for pre-order, a pack of 10 for $99, a much smaller price than the original Beacons package. The pack will come with a handful of specialty “activity” stickers with suggested places to put them, like a bicycle, computer, car, or dog. Additionally, there are blanks. These contain all the same hardware but are preloaded with code suggestions for developers to try out specialty apps. It is Estimote's way of “nudging people towards making things”. The company expects as with all new technologies, the price of beacons should go down over time, eventually costing “almost nothing”.