Grizzly Analytics Blog

Grizzly Analytics has a client that owns a US granted patent related to location positioning by inertial navigation (a.k.a. sensor fusion, dead reckoning).  This  client is interested in selling or licensing this patent. As everyone reading this knows, this area is becoming very hot because of its value in indoor location positioning . Inertial navigation is one of the technologies developed by WiFiSLAM , the company that Apple recently acquired, and is also one of the methods being researched by Google and slowly incorporated into Google Maps for Mobile. Inertial navigation has been part of several other big deployments of indoor location technology (e.g., here  and here ). The client's patent has an effective date of May, 2001, which is 6-8 months earlier than other early patents on inertial navigation owned by Motorola and others. Anyone interested in learning more about the patent that our client has, or interested in buying or licensing it, should cont...

News broke in the Wall Street journal blogs on Saturday  that Apple has acquired WiFiSLAM, reportedly for around $20 million.  This is one of the first major acquisitions in an area that's poised to explode in 2013. The Grizzly Analytics 268-page report on indoor location positioning technology profiles both Apple and WiFiSLAM, and predicts that Apple will make an acquisition in the area.  Here are a few reasons that their acquisition of WiFiSLAM makes a lot of sense. Apple has for years been preventing indoor location apps from running on iOS.  They've done this by withholding Wi-Fi received signal strength indicator (RSSI) data from apps.  This is the data that most Wi-Fi-based indoor location systems use to analyze nearby Wi-Fi access points and calculate their location.  We're written before ( here ) about this problem and how some companies are getting around it. But the biggest question has always been why Apple was doing this. They're the pionee...

In December, 2011, Grizzly Analytics released our first comprehensive report on indoor location positioning technology, predicting that indoor location technologies were going to revolutionize the mobile industry.  In our updated report in May, 2012, we predicted that indoor location technologies were poised to reach market.  Now, in March, 2013, we see how true these predictions have been.  Indoor location technology is nearing its tipping point, with new announcements in mass-market and location-specific solutions coming out on a daily basis. In this fully revisedand updated 268-page report , Grizzly Analytics gives an up-to-date analysis and comprehensive overview of indoor location positioning R&D.  Read about the research activity of all the major mobile companies – Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Apple, Nokia, RIM, Sony Ericsson, Motorola & others – the major chip and network makers - Cisco, Qualcomm, Broadcom, STMicroElectronics, CSR, Aruba ...

The first in our blog coverage of MWC 2013 is SK Telecom's indoor location demo.  Grizzly Analytics has been analyzing indoor location positioning R&D for years, and it's good to see it reaching market, with many start-up companies, phone makers, chip makers and telecom operators showing technologies and solutions. SK Telecom's solution, shown in the video below, shows the user's location on a 3D map, and updates the location smoothly as the phone moves around the area.  Their solution also includes GeoFencing, whereby information can pop up on the screen when the user gets to a particular place. Their indoor positioning is achieved using beacons, dedicated radio devices deployed around the area covered.  Their beacons use Bluetooth to communicate with the phones, and the phones calculate their position based on the signals received from the beacons.  The beacons also define the GeoFences for information pop-ups. Like many solutions reaching m...