Broadcom licenses metro indoor technology from NextNav

Chip maker Broadcom just announced that they are licensing metropolitan indoor location technology from USA-based NextNav.

NextNav, one of over 50 companies developing technology for indoor location positioning, has developed unique technology for enabling indoor positioning in metropolitan and urban settings. Their radio beacons are deployed throughout cities, and their signals can penetrate buildings and enable indoor positioning in places that GPS can't reach. Because they are deploying their beacons throughout cities, they have much broader coverage than Wi-Fi or BLE based approaches. They offer positioning in 3 dimensions, including altitude.

The press releases indicate that Broadcom is buying a commercial license to NextNav's technology, enabling them to add support for NextNav beacons to their chips, but are not acquiring the company itself.

Broadcom already offers chips that support a wide variety of indoor location positioning technologies, including W-Fi, Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy, and MEMS-based sensor fusion (inertial navigation). This picture is from a demo that Grizzly Analytics saw 7 months ago at the MWC conference - the black device on the wall in the upper right is a beacon that their device was using (along with MEMS sensors) to determine positioning on the map. But these beacons, using BLE or other technologies, only reach within a short radius, and cannot offer the city-wide coverage that NextNav is envisioning.

Will Broadcom chips soon offer support for NextNav's Metropolitan Beacon technology? Is this a vote of confidence in NextNav's deployment? Will NextNav's technology be deployed in enough cities for this to give Broadcom an edge? Only time will tell. But the indoor location arena is continuing to heat up, and develop in new and interesting directions.....

Finding indoor location tech, and fans, at MWC 2017

Over 100,000 people are now planning to attend the 2017 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, in February. Many will flock to the newest devices, many to the keynote speeches from market leaders, and many to the latest tech from a huge variety of exhibitors. But how does anyone find all the tech they want to see? Anyone who has been to MWC in the past will tell you that there is no way to be sure you're seeing all that you want to see. Anyone interested in indoor location technology now has a solution. The Grizzly Analytics Guide to Indoor Location Technology at MWC2017 will list all the companies at MWC that are demonstrating, presenting or talking about indoor location tech. (Obviously we may miss one, but since we've reported on indoor location tech from over 200 companies , we expect to be fairly comprehensive.) The guide will be organized by technology type and also by MWC hall number, so you can plan your time accordingly. If you are exhibiting i

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

Indoor Location, GeoFencing and Retail (Updated w/ video)

We've written a lot about indoor location technology , which is bringing location services indoors where GPS doesn't work. And we've written more recently about GeoFencing , a new location technology that enables smartphones to display content or take other actions when entering a specified area. And a few weeks ago we wrote about a company that was bringing the two together . Now Aisle411 has entered the ring, adding GeoFencing to their indoor solution . And they're bringing GeoFencing to life in the retail store industry . Aisle411's solution lets you navigate your way around a store to find specific products on the shelves. You can even enter your whole shopping list, or the items you need for a recipe, and the app will guide you around the store to buy everything you need quickly. And here's where the GeoFencing comes in: As you near certain products, you'll get offers for related products on your smartphone screen. They might be as s

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