Why STMicroelectronics bought projector start-up BTendo

We've written a number of times about an R&D collaboration between STMicroelectronics and an Israeli company called BTendo that's developed leading technology for scanning laser projection. Their collaboration, combining BTendo's projection technology with STMicroelectronics MEMS expertise, has developed a pico-projector component designed for phones and other electronic devices.

Earlier this month the news broke that STMicroelectronics has acquired BTendo.

We wrote about their projection component back in March, reporting on the new trend in cellphone projectors at MWC. Their prototype showed the projector in action as a distinct device, but their target is to have the component embedded into cellphones and other devices.

Their specs are similar to those of the Samsung's Galaxy Beam. They're targeting 12-15 Lumens, and resolution anywhere from SVGA up to WXG. This component could be the way that other cellphone makers will catch up to Samsung in equipping phones with projectors.

Grizzly Analytics has long felt that cellphones with embedded projectors would have a huge potential in the consumer content-consumption area. Projectors have usually been discussed for business users, but I think that the new generation of mobile movie-watchers and movie-sharers will enjoying having a projector in their pockets.

The biggest question is why ST chose to acquire BTendo now. Is the tipping point coming for cellphone projectors? Does ST have deals in the works for embedding their projector technology into new cellphones?

As even more far-out speculation, we've long suspected that the upcoming iPhone 5 will have something really new. Apple has a way of getting analysts and pundits to think about the incremental improvements, and then throw out a radically new thing. Will September's news about the iPhone 5 include a projector? Will it be based on technology from ST? Only time will tell..... But if it's not Apple, it going to be someone else who brings this great new pico-projector component to market.

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

See great indoor location tech from the 2017 testbed

The videos from the Indoor Location Testbed at GeoIoT World 2017 are now released! Here is your chance to see how these solutions performed in our real-world evaluation, in the videos below. The testbed evaluated each solution by walking around a real-world venue, the GeoIoT World 2017 conference, measuring performance at 10 pre-selected points. Click here for the testbed report, which analyzes each solution's performance in a wide variety of metrics, including real-time accuracy, accuracy stabilization, consistency, latency, floor change, first fix, setup time & more. Let's start with BlooLoc's tag-based solution, which achieved accuracy under 2m in real-time and under 1.5m after stabilization: Then let's look at the infrastructure-free solution from GipsTech , which achieved accuracy under 2m without using any beacons or radio signals: Next is GipsTech's solution with BLE added: Next is BlooLoc's phone-based solution: Fin

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