Shortcomings in iOS5 location-based reminders and existing mobile apps

In June, 2011, Apple announced that Location-Based Reminders would be a new feature of iOS5 on iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices. Grizzly Analytics sees the Apple announcements as a tipping point that is likely to propel location-based reminders into the mass-market.

But Location-Based Reminders as announced by Apple, and as implemented by mobile apps currently on the market, have shortcomings that limit their usefulness. They can remind users when they pass their neighborhood supermarket, but not when they pass any supermarket. They can remind users when they’re near the store they need, but not when they’re driving along a route that will take them near the store soon. They remind users regardless of the hours that a store is open and regardless of whether the items the user needs are in stock. And they don’t take traffic conditions into account in generating reminders.

All these shortcomings are the subject of active research by major mobile companies, including Microsoft, Apple, Nokia, Palm and many others. In its latest market and technology trend report, Location-Based Reminders: Initial Implementations and Future Advances, Grizzly Analytics reviews research currently underway, identifies information being gathered in the local search and e-commerce markets (by Google, EBay, local.com and others) that will facilitate more powerful location-based reminders, and reports how these will enable location-based reminders to revolutionize how cellphone users manage tasks and schedules and how they find nearby places to carry out their to-do tasks.

Intel demos indoor location technology in new Wi-Fi chips at MWC 2015

Intel made several announcements at MWC 2015, including a new chipset for wireless connectivity (Wi-Fi) in mobile devices. This new chipset, the 8270, include in-chip support for indoor location positioning. Below we explain their technology and show a video of it in action. With this announcement, Intel joins Broadcom, Qualcomm and other chip makers in moving broad indoor location positioning into mobile device hardware. The transition of indoor location positioning into chips is a trend identified in the newest Grizzly Analytics report on Indoor Location Positioning Technologies , released the week before MWC 2015. By moving indoor location positioning from software into hardware, chips such as Intel's enable location positioning to run continuously and universally, without using device CPU, and with less power consumption. Intel's technology delivers 1-3 meter accuracy, using a technique called multilateration, generating a new location estimate every second. While 1-

The year indoor location will truly take off

For years I've been writing sentences like "this will be the year that indoor location will explode into the market." I, and many others, have been expecting indoor location technology to enable the huge range of location-enabled apps, which currently work only outside where GPS signals are available, to work inside. But until now the promise of indoor location has remained a promise. But if we look at the reasons for this, we'll see that it is about to change. 2017 and 2018 are poised to be the years that the challenges keeping indoor location from going mainstream will be solved. First is accuracy. Most indoor location technologies until a year or so ago had accuracy in the range of 4 to 8 meters. This sounds good in principle, and in fact is better than GPS in many cases. But GPS systems are able to use road details to hide their inaccuracies, so that the blue dot seems to follow your driving car almost perfectly. But indoors, this sort of inaccuracy means y

Waze and Google Maps: A Quick Comparison

I've been a big Waze fan for years, relying on it to make my daily commute as quick as possible. I try to never leave my hometown without checking Waze first to avoid getting stuck in traffic. For those of you who don't know about Waze, they basically crowd-source traffic information, learning where traffic is slow by measuring how fast their users are moving. This traffic information is then used to route people in ways that will truly be fastest. (Apple has reportedly licensed Waze data for their upcoming maps app.) Waze is used most heavily abroad, and is only recently building a following in the States. (It was also just reviewed on the Forbes site .) So on a recent trip to the States, I decided to compare Waze to the latest USA-based version of Google Maps for Android. In a nutshell, I reached three conclusions. (1) Google's use of text-to-speech in their turn-by-turn directions is very nice. (2) Google's got Waze beat in terms of explaining what

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