A letter from the CEO

Let me give you the story behind BlueCats. It’s a story about how we got to where we are and why the past 10 years of experience has positioned us to deliver something really special to the world.

In 2009, all we wanted to do was track the movement of shopping carts as they moved through a grocery store. In order to achieve this, an accurate tracking technology was required. We found a company in Huntsville, Alabama called Time Domain who had created, many years earlier, a proprietary Ultra-Wideband (UWB) tracking solution. 

It took some serious effort to get deployed, but once configured, it was incredible. This was the moment we realised real-time location can transform so many businesses. The challenge was creating a real-time location system (RTLS) solution that could scale. No one had done that (then and now).

In 2011, Time Domain spun off a bunch of IP and engineers and Plus Location Systems was formed. Throughout the ensuing 8 years, the team at Plus have tracked everything from cattle to forklifts to NFL players and everything in between.

Meanwhile, the team at BlueCats were busy launching one of the first Bluetooth® Low Energy beacon offerings (2012). A year before Apple anointed the term iBeacon™, our team was busy convincing the world what could be achieved with Bluetooth beacons and some app integrations.  

The world was buzzing about beacons and all that could be achieved and BlueCats was right in the middle of it. But there was a problem. Beacons had promised to bridge the digital and physical worlds. They were heralded as “cookies for the real world”.  Both valid claims. However the real challenge was there was a genuine disconnect between the digital and physical worlds. 

Companies that owned or managed physical stores, on most occasions, didn’t have the digital coverage required to leverage beacons. Likewise, apps and digital companies lacked access to the real estate required. In most cases, the simple but compelling value proposition for the customer or end user did not exist. Many projects that BlueCats has been involved in seemed to be projects designed specifically to use beacons as opposed to projects designed to solve a genuine problem or deliver real value.

In 2016 BlueCats began working closely with Plus, bringing it all together! 

Over the past few years, we have been working tirelessly on creating a solution that combines all our technology, all our experience, and most importantly offers the features that customers need to actually use real-time location. 

We realised that RTLS means different things to different customers and even different things to stakeholders within the same company or industry. Whatever the term RTLS means to you, we think it can be summarised as Digital Awareness®. 

We want businesses to make real decisions based on real metrics. Metrics based upon what is actually happening within a business. Metrics that up until now, could not be efficiently collected, justified and validated. Decisions that for years remained based on gut feel.  

Our vision at BlueCats is to provide digital awareness to every business on the planet.

We are just getting started.

Cheers

Nathan

Nathan Dunn

CEO