Grizzly Analytics Blog

Over a year ago, in our analysis of indoor location positioning technology , we noted a lot of research by major mobile companies in sensor fusion, using a smartphone's sensors to detect the phone's motion and thereby track the phone's location.  At the time we predicted that start-up companies would emerge that take this approach to indoor location positioning. In the year since, we've seen a number of start-up companies launching sensor fusion technology. In recent months we've blogged about the Senion Labs launch in Singapore , which was the first large-scale commercial launch based on sensor fusion, and Pole Star's launch that included sensor fusion for iPhones, both of which integrated sensor fusion with other technologies. We also blogged about SenionLabs sensor fusion technology when we first saw it at MWC 2012. The reason that these companies used sensor fusion in conjunction with other technologies is that sensor fusion is very hard to impleme...

Word is starting to get out about Quuppa , a company formed in September 2012 that's developing very high accuracy indoor positioning technology (HAIP).  To Quuppa, "high accuracy" means roughly 20cm.  Yes, 20cm. 8 inches. That's an order of magnitude better than the 4-5m accuracy that other start-ups are bringing to market, and two orders of magnitude better than the 15-20m accuracy that mass-market approaches like Google's are delivering. Update March 2015: See here for more up-to-date information on Quuppa. As of now this high level of accuracy is available only for tracking dedicated tags.  It won't be available for cellphones until some new Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) features become standard. (On cellphones they're working on other good, but not quite as accurate, positioning.)  But check out their demonstration - in this game of basketball, the players have tags on their shoes, and the ball has a tag inside. Pretty amazing for a company fou...

We've written a lot about indoor location positioning technology .  At last count it's being researched by several dozen major mobile companies and developed by almost forty start-up companies.  We've blogged about systems from Nokia , SenionLab , Meridian , Pole Star and others.  The technologies for indoor location positioning include Wi-Fi fingerprinting , sensor fusion , Wi-Fi network-centric tracking , dedicated Bluetooth beacons , hybrid approaches , and more .  The field is exploding. We've also written recently about GeoFencing .  GeoFencing enables an action to be taken when a device enters or leaves a specific geographical area.  Our recently released report on GeoFencing includes 145 pages of details of R&D by all the major mobile companies and a growing number of start-ups. Today these two hot areas, Indoor Location and GeoFencing, meet each other, in the form of SenseWhere's GeoWhere.   GeoWhere uses SenseWhere's indoo...

Just published in SeekingAlpha : ... GeoFencing, in a nutshell, enables an action to be taken when a device enters or leaves a specific geographical area...  But the big challenge with GeoFencing is implementing it efficiently and effectively...  Apple already offers, in iOS and OS X, its Core Location Framework that supports GeoFencing, among other location functions, for app developers. Apple has researched and patented a technology that they call multi-tier GeoFencing, whereby a phone monitors its coarse location easily and efficiently by cell ID until it gets close to a GeoFence, at which point it switches to GPS.... Click here to read this whole article, by Grizzly Analytics chief analyst Bruce Krulwich.