Today's smartphones are stuffed with sensors and radios. They're constantly in contact with cell towers, Wi-Fi access points, and spaceborne satellites. And yet, there's only so much these super-sophisticated devices can glean about where we really are and what we're really doing. Our smartphones can guide us to the museum or to the mall, but once inside, we're on our own. GPS takes us to the front door, but no further.

The disconnect is even more pronounced when you look at what actually happens inside these places. How much do our phones know about the stores we're in, or the product we're holding, or the painting we're looking at? Zilch, essentially. It's funny when you think about it. That thing in your pocket can ping a server on the other side of the world to answer your every fleeting question, but it has no idea what's going on right next to it. Your phone can track Chipotle's stock price in real time, but it's clueless to the fact that you're standing in one, about to order a burrito.

>Our smartphones can guide us to the mall, but once inside, we're on our own.

Thanks to a new generation of wireless technologies, however, that could change–and faster than you might think. A network of cheap, low-energy transmitters, or beacons, could give our devices a whole new degree of locational awareness–down to a few inches, even–directing us effortlessly through maze-like big box stores and giving independent businesses the tools to extend their operations into the digital world. First, though, someone has to build that network of beacons. And starting with a developers kit of three plastic sensors selling for $99 and shipping next month, that's exactly what Estimote is trying to do.

In the words of Jakub Krzych and Łukasz Kostka, the Polish computer scientists who founded the company last year, Estimote is an attempt to build an operating system for the physical world. Instead of continuing to focus on the nebulous, everywhere-and-nowhere concept of the cloud, Krzych and Kostka envision a new class of interactions and experiences that are tightly integrated with real places, from parks to parking lots. With Estimote, however, they're focusing on just one segment of micro-location's potential: retail.

To get the ambitious dream rolling, Estimote will offer businesses big and small two things: a series of cheap, low-energy sensors and some software for making use of them. The hardware takes the form of a "mote," a diminutive waterproof module that houses a Bluetooth Low Energy radio. Each mote can sense the presence of a Bluetooth Low Energy-equipped smartphone–Apple's baked it in to the last few versions of the iPhone; Android manufacturers have been slower to adopt–from roughly 150 feet away down to just one or two inches. Add a few more motes and they'll communicate with each other, triangulating the position of that smartphone in space. One mote could tell a mom-and-pop coffee shop that you'd walked in the door; six could tell it you were hunched over the pastry case.

>Estimote is an attempt to build an operating system for the physical world.

That scenario is one Estimote is actively pursuing. "In order for this technology to be popular, it has to be both very simple to install and understand for a small business, and it also has to be really simple for a customer," Krzych says. To that end, he and his partner have worked to streamline the process of small business involvement. Estimote's developers kit, currently available for preorder, will include three motes and cost $99. Out of the gate, the company will offer a few tools for taking advantage of them.

Business owners will be able to use their new location-aware powers to beam personalized deals and promotions to smartphone-wielding customers who've opted in to receive them, but they'll also be able to access sophisticated analytics on when those people entered the store, and what they spent their time doing there. For bigger chains, Estimote will serve up code that can be integrated into existing apps. In an Ikea decked out with motes, Krzych suggets, you wouldn't have to write down all those funny Swedish names on a piece of paper. Instead, your phone would automatically generate a list of all the products you stopped to touch, test, or plop down in throughout the day.

The company's developers kit will give businesses three motes for $99. Image: Estimote

Of course, a whiz-bang platform that lets your local coffee shop pipe ads to your phone with the same annoying efficiency as the Starbucks down the street might not sound very appealing. But like any network, the wider it spreads, the more useful it gets. Bluetooth Low Energy beacons will only get cheaper and smaller–Krzych said that soon you'd be able to fit one on something like a Band-aid–and with that sort of ubiquity, all sorts of interesting interactions open up. Stopping in front of a concert poster could instantly set a reminder to check out tickets once you got home. Or it could add that band to your Spotify playlist; or it could let you buy the tickets then and there. The magic is that it's all automatic. "It's frictionless," Krzych says. "There are no QR codes; no URLs. You just take your phone out and unlock it. That's all you have to do."

In Krzych's mind, this type of seamless locational awareness could utterly transform our shopping experience. His ultimate, admittedly romantic vision is something like a small business renaissance, where local spots become specialized showrooms. They wouldn't hold any actual inventory; rather, you'd go to one for their personal touch and expertise, try out a few products and figure out which you wanted, and then your phone would seamlessly pass that sale off to Amazon or some other voracious, low-cost competitor. "So the showroom owner will not sell goods; he will sell leads," Krzych says. "The whole dirty part–the transaction, the shipping"–that all gets shifted to someone else.

That model may be a bit far-fetched. But it's far from the only way that Bluetooth Low Energy could transform how we shop–or really do anything–with our mobile devices. Right now, Estimote's real goal is to proliferate the sensors and establish the network. An SDK will let other people build on top of it. Eventually, the hope is that our beacon-laden cities will be able to accommodate a new, location-specific class of experiences. "That's our vision," Krzych says. "Future applications won't be installed on smartphones, but on top of locations, on top of venues. And in order to get there, we need to make a few basic apps ourselves."

iBeacon, a new feature in iOS 7, will bring deeper integration with these types of sensors. Image: Apple

Estimote isn't alone in leading the Bluetooth Low Energy charge. A key feature slated for inclusion in iOS7 shows that Apple's eyeing the potential here, too. It hasn't said much about the new protocol, iBeacon, but it cropped up in several presentations at the Worldwide Developer's Conference earlier this year. Basically, the best guess among developers on the web is that it will allow iPhones to look for these Bluetooth beacons continuously in the background of day-to-day operation. You wouldn't necessarily need to open the Ikea app to get those product-tracking features during your visit; they'd just happen. Instead of continuously returning to the MoMA app throughout your walk around the museum, you could stand in front of an artwork, pull out your phone, and the explanatory information would be there waiting for you when you unlocked it. Or maybe, since it recognized you were in a museum setting, you wouldn't need to unlock it at all.

As with all advances in technologies that keep track of where we are, the security and privacy implications with these Bluetooth Low Energy sensors are profound. Beacons that track us not only as we walking down the sidewalk but as we move throughout department stores, or even room-to-room inside our homes, give rise to all sorts of concerns. At least in this case, though, they bring the potential for a fundamentally new paradigm of applications along with them.