Kontakt.io Launches Cloud-enabled Portal Beam Sensor Platform

Kontakt.io, an enabler in indoor IoT location services, has launched Portal Beam, a 9-in-1 cloud-enabled sensor platform quantifying rooms and delivering building insights in real-time.

Portal Beam uses nine different sensors: thermal camera for occupancy and people counting, temperature, humidity, air quality, light, smoke detection, infrared beaconing, RSSI fingerprinting, and iBeacon.

The Portal Beam comes with an 8-core CPU with Neural Network architecture and Bluetooth 5.0 readiness. Out of the box, it is compatible and seamlessly integrates with any BLE-gateway and the 1-click, self-onboarding workflows of the Kio Cloud. The Kio Cloud and Portal Beam are opening a new era of IoT devices to quantify buildings, converging Indoor Location, Environmental Monitoring and Occupancy Analytics.

Portal Beam is a wireless, BLE, cloud-based, and full of powerful technologies that run on top of the Kio Cloud, delivering actionable insights in real-time and helping you to understand your physical workspace better. Its value proposition falls into 5 buckets:

Occupancy monitoring: Count people without requiring them to wear a beacon. Portal Beam deployed on a ceiling lets you monitor how people occupy spaces and track the occupancy of buildings, floors, rooms, and desks without infringing on privacy.

Environment monitoring: Monitor rooms 24/7. With its rich set of sensors, Portal Beams ensure a safer and healthier workplace, reduce a building's carbon footprint, and help improve the employee experience.

Indoor navigation: Enable indoor navigation. With built-in iBeacon, Portal Beams improve orientation inside buildings with compatible indoor navigation apps.

IR beaconing: Achieve room-level tracking certainty of IoT devices. Portal Beam enables location-tracking use cases in which room-level certainty is required. With IR-Beaconing BLE-devices such as the new Kontakt.io Smart Badge, people can be located with room-level certainty at all times. IR-Beaconing enables a new range of high-accuracy location tracking use-cases especially relevant for healthcare and hospitality, including contact tracing, nurse duress, visitor management, evacuation tracking, and more.

Automated RSSI Fingerprinting: Improve the location accuracy of existing BLE-enabled Wi-Fi access point networks. Extend the existing access point typology with Portal Beams combined with cloud AI and improve room-level accuracy for tracking any BLE devices.

"The introduction of the Kio Cloud-enabled Portal Beam represents a bold change that was over a year in the making, and marks a historic day for Kontakt.io's future software-defined product portfolio," says Philipp von Gilsa, Kontakt.io CEO. "This is the most powerful value proposition we've ever crafted targeting customers and partners in healthcare, workspaces and hospitality. The integrated hard- and software offering checks all the boxes. We can now deliver occupancy, environmental IoT and location use-cases end-to-end to both enterprises using our open architecture, integrations, APIs as well as to SMBs with use-case specific apps and dashboards. The total cost of ownership of the entire product and architecture is less than a third of any alternative offerings in the space that mostly cover only parts of the value proposition. How do we do it? The device communicates directly with the Wifi network you already have in place over BLE and completes it from both a soft- and hardware angle. Four years of battery life, no cabling and 1-click onboarding to the cloud turn the planning, installation and maintenance cost close to zero. The new Kio Cloud, with its new policy foundry and event-stream APIs together with use-case specific apps allow you to tap into use-cases in minutes. It's as easy as setting up a Nest or a Gmail account, just at enterprise scale."