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Two indoor location demos to see at MWC 2014

I'm blogging
now from the 2014 Mobile World Congress, MWC 2014, in Barcelona, so I'm writing quickly. If you or a colleague are at MWC, and are interested in indoor location technologies, there are two demos that you definitely want to see. (In fact, there are more than two, and I'll blog about others later. But the others will take more explanation, and I wanted to share these two now quickly.)

The first is in the official MWC mobile application. In the mapping section, you can see your own location and track yourself on the map as you move around. You can also navigate to specific booths you're looking for. As I wrote earlier, the location positioning in this app is based on technology from PoleStar, even though this isn't indicated explicitly since they were a subcontractor to a subcontractor.

The location positioning uses a combination of Wi-Fi fingerprinting, BLE beacons, and motion sensing.  The positioning isn't perfect, which isn't a surprise since the RF conditions at the conference are crazy and very dynamic, but it's definitely good enough to be effective in finding where you and and where you're going. You can judge for yourself in the video below.

The second is a much more precise location positioning demo from SK Telecom, in hall 3. This demo is more precise because they're using UWB (ultra-wideband) technology from a company called DecaWave. We've written more about DecaWave's technology and the benefits of UWB here. As you can see from the video below, UWB gives this demo much more meter-by-meter precision.

These are two of more than a hundred indoor location technologies analyzed in the recently-updated 417-page Grizzly Analytics report on indoor location.

If you're at MWC, there are many more indoor location demos to be seen as well. I'll be blogging more about some of them soon.  Enjoy the conference!

Here are the videos. First the MWC app:

And now the SKT demo:


Looks like lots of action in the indoor location area this year... stay tuned for more!


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